Love is indefinable, ever-present but also a mere shadow of itself, in Christopher Honoré’s latest film Sorry Angel. The on-again, off-again romance between thirty-something Parisian novelist Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps) and early-twenties Breton étudiant Arthur (Vincent Lacoste) provides the exhilarating center for a film in which a succession of men come and go, unabashed in erotic connection if timid in commitment. These two circle around each other for a number of unspecified years, in the early nineties, during the height of the AIDS crisis; though disease and decline loom, it does not define or overwhelm them or the film. Honoré refuses to make their lives common tragedy, and the film is all the more powerful and poignant for it. Sorry Angel, by design, chronicles a decade of death and uncertainty yet is more driven by the emotional specificity of queer love, laying bare its conundrums without any pretensions to “universalization.”

The washed-out handsomeness of Deladonchamps, whom one might readily recall from his role as a death-driven cruiser in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, is used to great effect as Jacques, who from the film’s beginning gives off a whiff of already having been through the mill, romantically and professionally. Everything in his life in Paris seems to be ill at ease: for three years or so, he has been mildly involved with a younger, cute but neurotic gigolo who seems vaguely disinterested in him; he’s financially dependent on his father and emotionally reliant on an older journalist friend, Mathieu, played with insecurity and wise restraint by a mustachioed Denis Podalydès. As we come to understand, there’s further reason for Jacques’s feeling unsettled: he’s HIV-positive, which makes it all the more crushing for him as he slowly comes to terms with the encroaching sickness of his AIDS-afflicted friend Marco (Thomas Gonzalez). Jacques is the kind of guy who thinks he’s avoiding conflict by staying emotionally disconnected from others but who ends up inevitably affecting everyone else’s life anyway; not for nothing does Marco at one point call him a “complicator.”

Arthur, on the other hand, dives headfirst into his and others’ lives with youthful abandon. Though he has a girlfriend, Nadine (Adèle Wismes), whom he seems mildly interested in, nighttime sojourns to a gay-cruisey parking lot indicate a still cloaked truer self waiting to fully emerge (Honoré films an early cruising scene with elegantly choreographed, wordless camera and body movements, its mechanical, silent eroticism in stark contrast to the rest of this garrulous film’s more impatient style). Intellectually curious, in a way that occasionally comes off as arrogant, Arthur—who like Honoré himself once was, is a university student in the city of Rennes—has an impish impulsiveness that stands in contrast to Jacques’s well-worn cynicism. Early in the film, Arthur casually asks his roommate, “Where will we be in 10 years?” with a bemused wistfulness. “We’ll be nothing,” his friend confirms with the playful, posturing worldliness of youth. The question hangs over the film, and makes us wonder how Jacques, whom Arthur hasn’t encountered yet, might respond. With age comes fatalism and illness, but these don’t speak for an entire life.

For a film that often wears its cinephile bona fides on its sleeve (posters adorning walls include Fassbinder’s Querelle and Carax’s Boy Meets Girl), its most charming conceit is having Jacques and Arthur meet cute in a movie theater during a screening of Jane Campion’s The Piano. Aside from functioning as an apt time marker (situating the film’s beginnings in 1993, which immediately places it in a lineage of trailblazing New Queer films), Campion’s film was the kind of art-house film that bridged gaps between different types of viewers, appealing to both outré and middlebrow sensibilities. This divide can be felt in the two men’s divergent reactions to the film: Arthur sniffs at it, deeming it “too storybook,” while wiser, older Jacques summarily, off-handedly chastises him for not noticing its brilliance. This all happens in the form of a pickup, which also reminds one of The Piano’s unabashed sexual frankness, often forgotten amidst talk of it as a Miramax prestige product. Few would mistake Sorry Angel for a middlebrow work, though for this film Honoré does trade in the shock value and whimsy of some of his earlier films (Ma mère, Love Songs) for a more pragmatic, character-driven approach, informed by a constantly simmering despair.

Yet in its specificity about the nature of queer desire, Honoré’s film isn’t out to mollify the masses. This is clear not only from its depictions of sex, which always feel authentic whether taking the form of joyful eroticism or mournful grief-fucking, but also in its recognition of gay heritage. Much as Honoré is concerned with issues of historical queer representation on film, Jacques embodies and pursues queer culture, making his homosexuality as much an intellectual as a physical pursuit. His sexual and emotional relationship with Arthur is also a transaction of ideas, a passing down of queer historical signifiers from one generation to the next so they don’t get lost in the avalanche of history. For Jacques, gay attraction also can’t help but exist along a continuum of cultural reference points, as is clear from his wholly entertaining telephone monologue to Arthur in which he details the categories of men one could fall in love with, and their respective identities: there’s the “Maxim’s” type (embodying youth and illusion), the “Walt Whitman” (the one who really sleeps around), the “Vondelpark” (the impassive Nordic sort who gives little in return), and the “Wrong Blond” (he’s not the boy you expected to show up, but he’ll do—W. H. Auden fell for one, Chester Kallman, apocryphally). Is brunet Arthur a potential Wrong Blond? Or perhaps fair-haired Jacques was all along?

As the film continues, Honoré’s characters spirited debates give way to blue-tinged melancholy. The realities of Jacques’s life—his illness, the son he had with his friend Isabelle (Sophie Letourneur)—increasingly come to the fore and to Arthur’s growing awareness, which is one with his expanding social consciousness. Honoré has said that Sorry Angel, the first film of his career to dive headlong into the nineties and all that decade meant for gay men and for him as an incipient gay artist, is “an incomplete transmission” and reflective of an “inconsolable feeling.” The film feels like a kind of reawakening to dormant, bestirred emotions; like Robin Campillo’s superb BPM (Beats Per Minute) from last year, it reopens the doors to a still tender recent past we’re only starting to come to terms with, especially in light of LGBTQ social and political advancements. Sorry Angel is clearly intensely personal for Honoré, and it’s part of a larger exorcising of pain, being the middle part of a triptych that includes his novel Ton père, published in France last year, and his play The Idols, which was staged for the first time this month, in Lausanne. It’s also inconclusive, as any impossible romance should be, ending in a moment of heartbreaking ambivalence that feels, sadly, just right.

Near the middle of Hong Sang-soo’s brief new film Grass, writer Ji-young (Kim Sae-byuk) lingers in an upstairs café. A flat, silvery sunlight floods the room. Because of an earlier conversation, we surmise she is waiting for someone, though we do not know—and never learn—who. Perhaps she has fibbed about a scheduled meeting to elude the coaxing Kyung-soo (Jung Jin-young), a male actor who propositions her by offering a secluded “writers’ retreat,” an idea she spurns by saying one should write alone. But there is no clear motivation for what she does next: Ji-young descends the stairs, only to turn and ascend again, as if her musculature has short-circuited. At first, her actions may stir our impatience. In a tireless loop, she tramps up and down the steps, first vexed, then coltish, then radiant with apparent bliss. Soaring strings fill the otherwise scoreless soundtrack. Through determined repetition, she attains a kind of grace.

Ji-young’s exercise mirrors the prolific output of South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, who has released five features in twelve months, including two at this year’s New York Film Festival: Grass and Hotel by the River. (The fest screened The Day After and On the Beach at Night Alone last fall.) Critics often remark on Hong’s brisk pace, and Hong ventriloquizes his critics via self-flagellating artists. The aforementioned Kyung-soo frets over “recycling material”; a writer in Hotel by the River mutters that one mid-level director “doesn't make films that appeal to the masses, but he's hardly a real auteur. He just seems ambivalent.” Ambivalence is Hong’s stock-in-trade. Neither self-inflicted jab from his films hits far afield from his circuitous approach—one that has yielded increasingly contained, almost hermetic films set in ordinary environs, with a familiar set of actors, and narratives of such minor shadings that they sometimes scan like hurried charcoal sketches. But the repetitiveness of his project lulls us into surprising moments of realization. We are trained, as when Ji-young repeats herself, to fix our eyes on the slight alterations between films.

Hotel by the River, which premiered at the Locarno Festival in August, finds Hong in a melancholy mood. He avoids the puckish pirouettes in time and the structural games of last year’s films for something more subtle and spare. Concurrent narrative strands follow two groups, who touch but never quite collide. In one, the venerated poet Ko Young-hwan (Ki Joo-bong), shaken by sourceless premonitions of his death, summons his semi-estranged adult sons, Kyung-soo (Kwon Hae-hyo) and Byung-soo (Yu Jun-sang), to the sleepy riverside hotel where he lives at the admiring owner’s behest. Masculine hesitancies and post-traumatic neuroses mar the reunion, and a succession of screwball slip-ups keep them apart. Across the hallway from Young-hwan, Sang-hee (Hong fixture Kim Min-hee, more a force than a muse) recovers from her affair with the help of her friend Yeon-ju (Song Seon-mi). Sang-hee has also burned her hand, and its stark white gauze makes her enduring emotional wounds visible in the frame. The two women pass much of the film in slumber, cocooned in a shared bed, sometimes stirring for murmured conversation. When a swift snowfall blankets the riverbank, Sang-hee and Yeon-ju marvel that they slept through its silent descent: “How could so much come down so quickly?” Kim Hyung-koo’s black-and-white cinematography lends their stroll through the voidish expanse a ghostly quality.

Rarely has a Hong film been so unpeopled, so strangely solitary. No other guests putter around the Hotel Heimat, and its proprietor—Young-hwan’s benefactor—remains off-screen even when he later boots the hapless writer from his room for, the sons speculate, refusing his friendship. (The film’s last gasp stokes the suspicion that the absent owner stands in for some other figure: our extra-cinematic auteur or a more cosmic one, with the power to punish when unacknowledged.) The sole human presence besides our troubled quintet is a puppyish hotel employee who pursues the autographs of Young-hwan and Byung-soo, the “ambivalent” filmmaker from above, with the not-quite-repentant refrain that she should leave them alone.

Fractured and bisected shots thicken the film’s eerie pall. In many of Hong’s films, the camera omits establishing and point-of-view shots to instead segment the space in a way that thwarts the viewer’s full grasp of it. Last year’s The Day After uses this mode to blur a male writer’s two female assistants—one an ex-lover, one (Kim Min-hee) stormily uninterested—and compare his careless handling of both, but here the aim is estrangement. Hong isolates his characters in space to stress their inability to connect with one another. This finds a punning counterpoint when Young-hwan unfurls the meaning of one son’s name as “side by side.” Our word-wise poet forgets that those who dwell side by side may not necessarily touch. Young-hwan, in fact, spends considerable screen time wandering away from his sons to amble the palatial hotel alone in a recapitulation of their alienated relationship. Near the snowy Han River, he makes his first contact with Sang-hee and Yeon-ju, but his fumbling insistence on their angelic beauty does nothing but break their reverie. That Sang-hee and Young-hwan never meet inside the walls of the hotel, despite their shared residency—and that his past parallels her married ex-lover, had his guilt not parted them—doubles down on the sense of failed kismet, of two strands that don’t quite spark, even when the elements assemble in perfect symmetry.

Another kind of solitude is circumscribed in Grass: that of the lone person existing among linked others. The film hews closer to the cinematic formula we expect from Hong, ditching the obscure effects of Hotel by the River’s handheld camera and startling scene inserts. Instead, Grass relies on his so-called “table shot,” centering characters over whatever coffee-cluttered or soju-soaked table they then occupy in a close-cropped master shot punctuated by occasional zooms. Over one day in a secluded, side-street café, a liminal way-station not dissimilar to the Hotel Heimat, romantic and platonic couples gather to dissect the fallouts of their torrid emotional lives. Speakers snipe, hush, or falter over untouched mugs as Kim Min-hee’s Areum—in a possible reprise of her same-named writer character in The Day After—lurks behind her laptop to type all she observes. One pair shouts recriminations over a mutual friend’s suicide. Another hems and haws about sharing an apartment after a suicide attempt. Kyung-soo offers to “collaborate” with Ji-young.

Occupying the same space, these mini melodramas nonetheless unfold in sequence, raising questions about their relationship to one another. Are the conversations happening simultaneously? Or are we seeing them—as Areum does—segmented? One even wonders if the narratives are a mere manifestation of Areum’s writing. She concludes each, after all, with a sometimes sentimental, sometimes bilious, voiceover that summarizes her feelings. (One barbed gem: “Pretty and composed—amuse yourselves. Don’t think about your own death.”) Heightening these flayed emotions is the strident presence of classical music in the café, explained as the unseen owner’s preference. This lush Schubert, Wagner, and Pachelbel could be read as cynical irony or earnest romanticism, but the winking way it floods the soundtrack is Hong at his trickster best. Does the wall-to-wall music express Areum’s own feelings? Areum does leave the café in one sequence, and it is then that we can glimpse her interactions with others, outside her filmic purpose as an all-seeing eye. She lunches with her brother to meet his potential fiancée, a writer turned stewardess, but soon excoriates the pair for their naiveté in matters of love—a sudden shift that echoes Kim Min-hee’s prickly performance in last year’s On the Beach at Night Alone, in which she drunkenly accuses her friends of being incapable of love. We have no sense of why she does this: is she cynical or merely protective?

Despite its intense emotional flights, Grass does build toward a moment of connection (a sentiment that Hotel by the River stifles). Areum strolls to her cosseted corner in the café, another table invites her for a sip of bagged soju, and the film ends. The writer is finished. After happiness, there is nothing more to add. Areum’s voiceover adopts a sentimental hush: “In the end, people are emotions. Emotions are gullible and forceful, precious, cheap and alluring.” For Hong Sang-soo, a gesture as mundane as sharing a table can propel cinema.

“The first subject matter for painting was animal. Probably the first paint was animal blood. Prior to that, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was animal.” — John Berger

It may seem a bold claim that animals have some kind of essential, even ontological, relationship to human culture, but a mere glance at online spaces confirms it. With cat videos, dog videos, critter cams, and the endlessly proliferating GIFs and memes, the Internet is clogged with animal media. Whether this media cutely anthropomorphizes, makes them uncannily alien or achingly empathetic, the sheer volume suggests the intensification of attention around humanity’s fellow fauna—an intensification that coincides, ironically and tragically, with rapidly accelerating rates of extinction in the animal kingdom. Animals have always reflected our own qualities back on us, both by mimesis and by contrast. Now, it seems, the representation of animals functions more frequently as a means of indexing those characteristics that humans have lost or failed to achieve: namely, their humanity.

Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff’s Los Reyes follows Chola and Football, a pair of stray dogs who reside in the oldest skate park in Santiago, Chile. The documentary is more substantial (and dialectical) than a Facebook dog-spotting video. But it dabbles in the same paradoxes of humanity’s peculiar relationship with animals that most animal media share—all while resisting the temptation to humanize its subjects’ essential caninity or smooth out the rough edges of their existence.

That existential roughness, rather than the expected furry softness, is one of the film’s primary textures. Shooting their dog protagonists in often exquisitely intimate close-ups of grizzled maws, fleshy gums, and weathered paw pads, the filmmakers foreground their curious status as semi-wild beasts that subsist both in the middle and at the margins of human society. The presumably elder Football, perpetually shaggy and bleary-eyed, is frequently seen lounging with an object in his mouth—a ball, a discarded bottle, an empty cigarette pack, even a rock—clenched in his blunted jaws. The sprightlier Chola is rather more engaged, barking at passing bikers, mules, and—sensing trouble—police-horses, or taking part in an invented game in which she dangles a ball at the edge of one of the skate park’s bowls, catching it at the precise moment it begins to teeter out of reach. Aside from these distractions— and the very occasional pat or ball-toss from a friendly passerby—all they really have is each other.

What is this companionship, exactly? The film mostly resists projecting human sociality onto the dogs, but the whole enterprise of making animals into characters makes the potential for anthropomorphism difficult to avoid. Their relationship is apparently one of friendship; they are not “married.” Each engages in a quick carnal liaison—Football humps a passing dog; Chola grinds on a pillow she’s found somewhere —but otherwise there is not much love to be found in the skate park. They are exposed to the elements and the park’s porous public space, constantly surrounded by people and animals, but they are mostly alone, together. Framed by the camera as they languidly lie together, gazing at one another, aware of each other, they enact a companionship of comfortable proximity. But it is also a companionship solidified by precarity: for although the dogs are, as the film’s title implies, the skate park’s unofficial monarchy, they are at other times guests in their own home—as when some kind of gaudy, corporate-sponsored skateboarding event seems to threaten to displace them.

It’s tempting, then, to see in the figure of the stray—the de-domesticated animal—a kind of symbolic archetype of contemporary life. Chola and Football have a home (the park) and even individual homes (do-gooders construct doghouses for them), but are nevertheless homeless. The park belongs to them, but as it in fact belongs to human society, even if it is usually the haunt of human society’s least valued members. As if to emphasize the dogs’ affinity with their human counterparts, the soundtrack frequently features excerpted conversations between the local teens who use the park. Against images of the dogs sleeping, looking, playing, investigating, we hear a babble of stoner jokes, complaints about parents and corrupt cops, disses, drug talk, tattoo show-and-tell, cries of teen angst and economic despair. Though we never see the teenagers, their dialogues lend to the images of Chola and Football a sense of counterpoint, an echo of the human world that intersects only occasionally or unconsciously with a canine one. But they also build a subtle concordance: Survival, after all, is the shared lot of dog and teenager alike, and the film makes their atomized daily fighting for subsistence, space, even pleasure in the increasingly segmented and stratified environment of the city into a shared struggle, the lot of the marginalized.

Los Reyes plays February 9 at Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of Film Comment Selects.

A thought: in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), when Raoul Walsh, in the role of John Wilkes Booth, discharged a stage pistol behind the ear of actor Joseph Henabery, playing President Abraham Lincoln, the cast and crew of that film were in closer historical proximity to the death of Lincoln than we stand today to the rash of assassinations that marked the 1960s. The American frontier was officially closed in 1890, a few years before Thomas Edison opened his first film studio, but there was still something of the smell of the prairie and pioneer life to which Lincoln had been born in the early years of cinema, not yet fenced in.

This feeling for that bygone world of freshwater creeks and tilled fields and as-yet-uncleared woods is one of the chief inducements recommending The Lincoln Cycle, consisting of ten two-reel episodes whose direction is credited to their star Benjamin Chapin, who plays both the adult Honest Abe and Abe’s male forebears, and who produced the entire pageant through his own independent Charter Features Corp.; he also provided the facilities for the shoot at his Benjamin Chapin Studio in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, rented especially for this purpose in 1916. I say “credited” because Chapin allowed no other names, including those of his co-stars, to be attached to the Cycle, though the filmmaker John M. Stahl would as early as 1917 make a convincing claim that he had done most of the important behind-the-camera work on the series; when a restoration of The Lincoln Cycle—all save the eighth and ninth episodes, lost to history—appeared as one of the centerpieces of last year’s Pordenone Silent Film Festival, it was as part of a program compiling Stahl’s existent silent films.

Chapin was in no position to protest Stahl’s ongoing claims, having died at age 45 of tuberculosis in the Loomis sanitarium of Liberty, New York, during the summer of 1918, his great work having at that point only followed Lincoln’s life up to 1863. We may accept that Chapin delegated direction duties to Stahl—Charter Features indeed placed a “wanted director” ad in Moving Picture World magazine, and many of the personnel on The Lincoln Cycle would go on to work with Stahl again—and that the architect of such unsurpassed studio era melodramas as Back Street (1932), Only Yesterday (1933), and Imitation of Life (1934) is responsible for the pictorial and emotional qualities of the work, but even still it needs still be said that Chapin was the driving force behind the series’ production.

Stahl, né Strelitsky in Azerbaijan, who’d left behind the Russian Empire with his family when still a child, shared the broad details of his biography with a number of Hollywoodians as an immigrant of Eastern-European Jewish stock. Chapin’s background, from what we can gather, seems to have been somewhat closer to that of Griffith, though where Griffith was raised in Kentucky and steeped in the mythology of the Confederacy and the Noble Lost Cause, Chapin was a native of Bristolville, Ohio, in the northeast of the state that had produced Union enforcers Sherman and Grant. He was born in either 1872 or 1874—sources vary—and his obsession with the life and times of the 16th president began early; by 1903 he had assayed it into a stage act, an impersonation that toured about under the sponsorship of the Presbyterian Church. His resemblance to the Great Emancipator was thought to be uncanny, and by 1906 he had turned his monologue into a four-act play which opened at 42nd St.’s Liberty Theatre, the same venue which immediately prior had played host to a production of Thomas W. Dixon, Jr.’s stage adaption of his novel The Clansman, the work that would provide the basis for The Birth of a Nation, which would finally have its premiere at no less a venue than the Liberty Theatre. (Today the façade of the building is used by the Times Square Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! museum.) The contrast between Dixon and Chapin’s shows was remarked upon by newspapers at the time, though any perceived rivalry didn’t prevent Chapin from eliciting a pull-quote from Dixon in his program notes. (This account is indebted to the research of Richard Koszarski in the journal Film History.)

It was the phenomenal success of The Birth of a Nation, along with the emergence of Abraham Lincoln as an increasingly prevalent stock movie character, which finally catalyzed Chapin into assaying his lifelong immersion in Lincolniana into a film—or, eventually, a sequence of films. Each of the episodes follows approximately the same structure: after first encountering Lincoln after his election to the office of Chief Executive, we flash back—usually prompted by the president spinning one of his yarns—to a scene from his family history or past, most of these depicting his time in Gentryville, Indiana, in the years immediately before or after the death of his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, from milk sickness. Chapin’s ambitions for the project were not small; a press book designed to entice exhibitors offered, “Those who know Wagner’s Nibelungen Cycle may associate with it some impression of the idea. Those who know the Passion Play at Oberammergau will realize something of its dramatic magnitude.”

As with Griffith’s film, The Lincoln Cycle combines the historical sweep of a nationwide crisis with a sense of family affair intimacy. Where Griffith’s film has the story of the War Between the States told through the respective fates of two clans, the Northern Stonemans and the Southern Camerons, Chapin’s (or Stahl’s…) serial narrative makes Gentryville, both in boyhood memory and in the “present day” of the 1860s, into a microcosm of the divided nation.

The central rivalry is between the Lincolns—father Tom (Chapin), mother Nancy (Madelyn Clare), sister Sarah, and young Abe, played as a boy by one Charlie Jackson—and another local clan, the father and son duo the Carters, who enjoy a higher standard of living than their neighbors in patched and torn clothes, but display a threadbare moral fiber. In the Cycle’s first chapter, “My Mother,” young Abe promises his dying mother that he will not brawl with his contemporary and archenemy, Huck Carter, any longer. In the fourth, “My First Jury,” he breaks his promise. This happens shortly after Abe has succeeded in defending, before a makeshift court of kids and farm animals, a Black neighborhood boy, Tom, from Huck, who has accused Tom of stealing a chicken from his family—which indeed he has done, though Abe argues that the chicken was first stolen from Tom’s family, a pretty handy summation of the dubiousness of property claims in these United States. He is caught in the act of brawling by a preacher, one Rev. David Elkin, who has come to Gentryville at Abe’s request to pray over his mother’s rude and unconsecrated grave; Elkin is nearly driven back home in disgust when he comes across the boys scrapping, but his hard heart melts when he sees the lad in private and earnest entreaties on the soil of his mother’s resting place. One kind turn deserves another: years later, in fifth episode “Tender Memories,” after the elderly Elkin’s son has joined the Confederacy, been captured, and been slated to hang, Lincoln will commute the sentence in tribute to this long-ago act of mercy. And who should have recruited the still-beardless Elkin, exposing him to this brush with death? Why none other than Huck Carter, of course, as rotten a man as he was a child.

“Men are only boys grown tall/ Hearts don’t change much after all” runs this episode’s epilogue, an encapsulation of the overall approach of The Lincoln Cycle, which locates in its subject’s childhood all the qualities that will distinguish him as a leader, not least among them a mercy that comes frequently couched in a sense of personal indebtedness. Abe is making good on an old arrears when he frees the Elkin boy, and we see that his sense of obligation extends beyond even his own lifeline in episode seven, “My Native State,” when he intercedes in an attempt by overzealous Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to confiscate the Washington, D.C. property of Edward Daniel Boone, grandson of the pioneer Daniel Boone. The reason for this exception? That his own grandpappy was friends with the illustrious Boone, as seen in an extended flashback in which forebear Abraham Lincoln of Virginia is played by none other than Benjamin Chapin. (Though much is unknown about Chapin, the one point on which all accounts seem to agree is that he did not lack for ego.)

The effect of all of this is to create a vision of America in wartime that remains provincial and insular in the extreme, where bonds of personal affection and accrued goodwill count every bit as much as the unbending rule of law. As it happens, The Lincoln Cycle was being produced at another pivotal moment in American history, one that would once and forever set the nation on its way to international superpower standing and remove it forever from this parochial past. This accounts in no small part for its somewhat schizophrenic depiction of Lincoln in relation to conflict. When work had begun on the Cycle, the United States was still hovering warily on the sidelines of the Great War then underway in Europe; by the time he had secured a New York screening for the first four then-completed episodes of his opus, America was at war, and the third episode “The Call to Arms” had been fixed with a new coda, in which a handwritten scrawl announced: “Today we must either move forward to loftier achievements of Universal Freedom or be set back for centuries into military servitude.”

While by no means operating on the scale of Griffith, Chapin and company manage some piquant scenes of war and its aftermath in The Lincoln Cycle: heaps of bodies stacked after a study of Mathew Brady, or a woodland skirmish with Indians in the final completed episode, “Under the Stars,” which returns to the time of Boone to record the death of Lincoln’s fabled grandfather. Even plunged into the crucible of war, though, the reflective character of Lincoln remains somewhat unstuck in time, as when an encounter with a soldier erecting a rude cross over the grave of a friend sends Abe’s mind casting back to the death of his mother—and there is something quite touching about the shift of scale here, the idea of a Great Man in the midst of righteous struggle who remains preoccupied with the memory of this rankling private hurt, a wound that will not close.

It is when dwelling on this loss that The Lincoln Cycle comes closest to touching a hidden tender spot of its subject, Lincoln’s ineradicable melancholy, reflected extensively in his own private correspondence and poetry, which includes a somber lyrical account of revisiting the scene of boyhood, “My Childhood’s Home I See Again,” a piece including such lines as “I range the fields with pensive tread/ And pace the hollow rooms/ And feel (companion of the dead)/ I'm living in the tombs.” While the film is somewhat innovative in its extensive use of flashback, its camera extravagancies are limited to a few brief dollies. What it offers in lieu of muscular filmmaking is an abundance of atmosphere, particularly in the simple, natural feel it displays for subsistence living on the fringes of civilization: the cluttered, smoky cabin with its lofted bed and the dinner table loaded with hunks of cornbread and corn mash, the family Bible and the few books with their pages marked by mold, hoarded like treasure. (The film is less at ease in the White House, save when it can turn the grounds into something out of Mark Twain, with Lincoln sons Tad and Willie frolicking in a convenient swimming hole.) While Griffith had more extras with him out in California, Chapin and his company have to their advantage the inimitable eastern woods, deep and damp and loamy, trees bare and spindly in winter and earth seen more than once under snow, to provide an approximation of both Lincoln’s middle-west and the battlefields of the terrible conflagration.

Chapin himself is appropriately towering, lank and raw-boned, a kind of proto-Carradine type, playing up both Lincoln’s homeliness (he looks the part of the “damned long-armed ape,” as Stanton is said to have cursed him) and his folksy friendliness, a comic aside ever at the ready, his ubiquitous shawl made just as crucial a part of the costume as the famous stovepipe hat. It is, in the truest sense, the role of a lifetime, with Chapin, like his idol, cut down before his immense task could be completed, before he could shoot the scene at Ford’s Theatre that would have brought the drama to a close, and shut off Lincoln from his memories once and for all. The job would be carried out time and again by others—by Griffith, once more, in his penultimate film, Abraham Lincoln (1930), with Walter Huston as Abe; by John Ford in his The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), whose Frank McGlynn, Sr. was an old hand at playing Lincoln, and had played Sec. Stanton in Chapin’s old Broadway production. But for all the merits these films display, they do not have that feeling of proximity to the world of Lincoln that one gets in Chapin’s Cycle, which carries the scent of a lost Arcadia supposed to have existed somewhere out west, sometime before the wars.

The Lincoln Cycle plays February 9 at Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of Film Comment Selects.

At first blush, coupling the films of Humphrey Jennings and Derek Jarman can feel a bit like spray-painting an obscenity over a “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster. The tonal, visual, and thematic contrasts between these two masters of British filmmaking all seem to converge around their seemingly diametric views of mother England—a sober bulwark of civilization for Jennings; a largely hollowed-out husk for Jarman. The creators of “Poets of Pandaemonium: The Cinema of Derek Jarman and Humphrey Jennings” more or less acknowledge their odd-coupling, with curator Max Carpenter noting the “speculative” nature of the series’ Jennings-Jarman double features. Few will walk out any of the series’ screenings mistaking the two men for long-lost cinematic soulmates. Indeed, it is this very acknowledgment that allows the series to both consider the filmmakers’ obvious divergences in new ways and explore subtler degrees of overlap between their work.

Both filmmakers adopted radically different stances toward their home country born out of both historical context and individual circumstance. After a peripatetic journey through academia, photography, and painting, Jennings came to film in 1934 after taking a job at the GPO Film Unit, a division of the UK General Post Office that eventually became a propaganda arm of the British Ministry of Information during World War II. Work within the unit (renamed the Crown Film Unit in 1940) necessarily adhered to the ideological contours of the government, yet one rarely feels Jennings chafing against this constraint. His documentary portraits of wartime England envision the era’s strife as both a test and confirmation of a sturdy and enduring national character. Little such patriotic optimism finds its way into the work of Jarman. Born in 1942 during the very national strife chronicled by Jennings, Jarman saw his work as a series of pointed provocations against England’s past and present. Most notably, this meant an injection of queer deviance and desire into dominant historical narrative, beginning with his 1976 debut feature, Sebastiane. This project became all the more urgent as the 1980s progressed, with the HIV/AIDS epidemic killing thousands of gay men including Jarman himself in 1994. In this respect, Jarman can be seen as much a wartime filmmaker as Jennings.

Ironically, it is one of the series’ most starkly opposing double bills that quietly complicates this dichotomous understanding of national character. It begins with Fires Were Started (1943), a docudrama centered on British firefighters battling blazes during the Blitz that stands as Jennings’s sole feature-length film and embodies much of his cinematic worldview. Much of the film’s first half consists of the men (real-life firefighters essentially playing themselves) going about their daily routines, which includes a robust helping of jocular banter and gather-round-the-piano bursts of song. As in much of Jennings’s work, these slices of everyday life are shadowed by the ominous threat of wartime chaos even as their casual rhythm and wry humor constitute an implicit rebuke of England’s enemies to fundamentally disrupt the country’s way of life. Still, the amorphous dread that underlies daily experience gains a particularly potent visual character here. An increasingly out-of-control warehouse fire consumes the film’s second half, with lengthy sequences of the firefighters attempting and failing to curtail the blaze as it threatens to spread to a nearby munitions ship. Jennings unfailingly finds moments of no-nonsense grit within this calamity. (In a scene that borders on self-parody, a telephone operator is thrown to the ground by an explosion, only to return to her post moments later and begs her interlocutor to pardon the interruption.) Yet the concluding note of stiff-upper-lip inspiration cannot fully dispel the unceasing images of wild flame and choking smoke that dominates Fires Were Started for almost 30 minutes. The title itself speaks to this duality, as much an acknowledgement of omnipresent threat as it is a paean to the patriotic flame within.

Fires Were Started gets paired with Jarman’s Jubilee (1977), which might be understood as a vision of England in which the blazes of World War II simply burned on, consuming both the nation’s physical infrastructure and social fabric. The film imagines contemporary England in post-apocalyptic terms—crumbling buildings, fascistic police, and a marauding gang that double as our would-be heroes. On paper, Jarman’s polysexual protagonists prove a roughhewn antidote to the decay of postwar British life. The film underscored its ties to the ’70s punk scene by casting musicians like Toyah and Adam Ant and foregrounding its aesthetic through the character’s eye-searing hair colors and leather-dominated attire. Just as one senses the chill of dread running beneath the surface of Jennings’s sober optimism, Jarman’s viewers hardly feel comforted by the film’s punks-will-inherit-the-earth narrative. An aggressive and violent work in both style and story, Jubilee alternately delights in its characters’ outré provocations and unblinkingly chronicles their acts of nihilistic cruelty. Anarchic queerness does not save a rotting Britain so much as just burrow into its carcass, overturning old pieties while remaining susceptible to the larger societal infection. No choice underscores the charged ambivalence at the heart of the film more than Jarman’s decision to frame Jubilee as the time-traveling exploit of Queen Elizabeth I, who sojourns some 400 years to observe the future state of her kingdom. She becomes a kind of audience surrogate, observing the wreckage with benumbed curiosity. No one would mistake this choice for crypto-conservatism, but it speaks to Jarman’s conflicted critical engagement with his own country’s legacy that transcends easy utopianism.

Indeed, these complex oscillations within each director’s view of England—Jennings’s optimism and unease; Jarman’s heritage and heresy—can be mapped onto a telling stylistic overlap between the two filmmakers. Both consistently returned to the relationship between sound and image throughout their careers as an ever-fruitful source of aesthetic challenge and inspiration. Explicit forays into sonic and visual juxtaposition constitute some of the most acclaimed work of their respective careers. The opening night double bill highlights this well, with Jennings’s Listen to Britain (1942), an aural-intense panorama of wartime life codirected with Stewart McAllister; and Blue (1993), where Jarman reduces the visual field to a single shade of the titular color and pairs it with an autobiographic array of voices, effects, and musical cues.

A coupling of lesser-known titles, however, offers a similarly rich mixture of sound and image that also grapples with notions of national legacy. Words for Battle (1941) constitutes yet another of Jennings’s meditation on the state of the war-buffeted British spirit, but it does so through the foregrounding of the nation’s literary tradition. Milton, Blake, Browning, Kipling—snatches from all of their work are alternately laid over moments of pastoral calm or post-bombing debris. Word and image frequently reinforce one another in hopeful fashion, even as the overlaying of Kipling’s “The Beginnings” (with its ominous records of “when the English began to hate”) onto bombed-out buildings eludes to the darker emotions underscoring the country’s wartime spirit. Beyond taking inspiration from these canonical texts, however, Jennings expands the canon of linguistic inspiration to include both Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. Such a move suggests a simultaneous respect for and engagement with English cultural inheritance at a moment of profound strife. Jarman’s The Angelic Conversation (1985) similarly recontextualizes the literary heritage of England, albeit through the lens of erotic expression over patriotic ardor. Following a pair of men through a series of physical wanderings and inchoate desires, the film pairs these images with various Shakespearean sonnets. Jarman remains uninterested in easy uptake or feel-good identity politics. He distances the viewer as much as ever, filming his unnamed protagonists in stuttering super 8mm images and committing long stretches of the film to enigmatic imagery. Yet the need to link queer longing to these most iconic of English poems gives The Angelic Conversation an ideological force that is both emotionally and intellectually satisfying. And while Jarman may not have had a world war as backdrop, the ever-worsening plague of HIV/AIDS on (amongst others) the nation’s gay men gives this project a piquant political urgency.

What Jennings and Jarman ultimately sought to valorize or expose about their country remains distinct, separated by time, identity, and ideology. How they chose to use the cinematic medium offers similar cleavages of aesthetic instinct and production circumstances. Despite all differences, though, a spirit of restless investigation ultimately connects these pairings—of national history, of formal limits, and the ways that the exploration of one entails the expansion of the other. That Jennings and Jarman are additionally linked by their untimely deaths at ages 43 and 52, respectively, adds a final, poignant wrinkle to the series. These titans of British cinema never had the chance to speak to one another, and yet this unlikely pairing sparks some lively conversation.

There is a tiny water-logged island in the Amazon river where the borders of Brazil, Colombia, and Peru meet. It's called La Isla de la Fantasia—fantasy island—and it provides the backdrop for Brazilian writer-director Beatriz Seigner's sophomore film, Los Silencios, which premiered at Cannes’ Director's Fortnight in 2018. In this place, the murky geographic boundaries are matched by an equally hazy division between the living and the dead. The film follows a mother fleeing the ongoing violence in Colombia that killed her husband. As the film opens, Amparo and her two children, Nuria and Fabio, arrive from a long, silent boat journey to the island. Her aunt greets her, “Hello my child. Welcome home my love... I can't believe you're still alive.” In the days that follow, Amparo looks for work and waits for reparations from the Colombian government, as the children adjust to school and their new life. It's a tenuous existence for the small family, with struggles at each turn: the cost of school uniforms, the cost of a lawyer, finding work. Amparo steadily overcomes each obstacle, all the while grieving for her lost husband, having conversations and arguments with him, asking for his advice.

La Isla de la Fantasia floods four times a year, and then re-emerges as before; the narrative of Los Silencios behaves in a similar manner, revealing visions or bits of information before submerging them time and again. While this changeability could create a sense of pure fantasy, Seigner doesn't give preference to one reality over another. She maintains realism by embedding viewers in the physical landscape with long static shots and limiting soundtrack to noises from the surrounding atmosphere of the island—living and dead inhabit the same space.

As Seigner was writing the script she spoke to the inhabitants of the island, and claims that at the end of every interview she would ask what scared them. Says Seigner, “Then everybody would tell me about the ghosts of the island, about how they came and went among the living.” She incorporated these stories into the script, weaving her narrative between realms. When German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt set off on his exhibition through this region of South America in 1799, his motivating force was “to find out about the unity of nature.” His writing from this period led to Western science's earliest understanding of ecosystems and the idea that every aspect of life is interconnected to a greater whole. In Los Silencios, Seigner finds a similar sense of unity, one heavily influenced by local tribes of the region who make decisions communally and also communicate fluidly with those who have passed on, incorporating their needs with those of the living.

Nearly a quarter of a million people have died in the half a century of conflict in Colombia.In one particularly powerful scene towards the end of the film, the dead assemble to discuss a possible peace deal between Colombia and the rebels and how it may affect them. The film crew left the camera rolling, as the nonprofessional cast reflected in real time on their own personal experiences living with the ongoing violence in their region, saying “we are at war with ourselves” and “we must forgive.” In an earlier scene the living villagers assemble to discuss a proposed development project on the island. “Yesterday a rich man came over with the Mayor. They said they want to buy the houses on the island. They want to build a casino and they want to build cabanas and hotels on the island. They said this island doesn't belong to Colombia, nor Brazil or Peru so they want to work on the island...” The villagers debate, most of them don't want to sell their land. “What happens if we refuse to sell our land? The army will come, or the police or the paramilitary, and force us out... We’ll die here and keep fighting against selling!”

In both of these scenes, Seigner makes palpable the tension between the local communities and the government and oil companies and corporate development. This political undercurrent throughout the film gently draws our attention to the many layers of pain the exploitative colonial legacy has left—and continues to make—on the landscape and people of this region. Seigner artfully weaves together this history with the lives of her protagonists, both living and not. Los Silencios is not a puzzle film, though it would seem to invite viewers to solve its mysteries. Who is living, who is dead? Though there may be answers, they seem to wash away as soon as they appear, as if to say: any boundaries we construct are strictly of our own invention. What remains instead are the cords that tie us to our communities and to each other.

Los Silencios plays February 8 at Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of Film Comment Selects.

The official history of M. Night Shyamalan’s career reads something like this. While hitting the jackpot with 1999’s The Sixth Sense and proceeding to make whatever he willed for the next decade, Shyamalan continually proved himself a gifted director often sabotaged by his lackluster writing and penchant for self-aggrandizement. For me, a true believer, the most sound argument for Shyamalan’s body of work has little to do with his auteurist status—that is, the formal and thematic continuities that can be taken as de facto evidence of his mastery. The most persuasive counter-narrative to the above history would instead upend misconceptions about the individual films themselves, demonstrating their mastery over form, the value of their nondenominational spirituality, and their complicated philosophical frameworks. Glass, though bound to an auteurist constellation of forms and ideas, is to my mind his first film since The Last Airbender (2010) that fails under this scrutiny.

Since Airbender and After Earth (2013) failed by all measures of critical acclaim and box-office accounting, Shyamalan re-emerged with The Visit (2015) and Split (2016)—genre exercises that, in spite of their circumscribed limitations, showcase the formal virtuosity and idiosyncratic sentiment characteristic of their maker’s finest films. Crucial to the rebranding of this period is the replacement of collaborators like composer James Newton Howard or cinematographers Tak Fujimoto and Roger Deakins with new ones: producer Jason Blum, composer West Dylan Thordson, It Follows cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, and actors James McAvoy (X-Men: First Class) and Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch)—all of whom provide variations on themes, forms, or archetypes germane to Shyamalan’s past films while allowing the director a veneer of reinvention. If Shyamalan regained some of his lost prestige by taming his less fashionable instincts in The Visit and Split, then Glass promptly squanders it. With its lugubrious plotting, protracted monologuing, unfashionable sense of humor, far-fetched twists, and insular mythology, this would-be comeback could easily be mistaken for willful self-sabotage. And I mean this to be at least partially flattering: Shyamalan, never one to sell out, has here cashed in on his recent successes, and fashioned a contemporary blockbuster after his own style and likeness.

Nineteen years since we left him in Unbreakable, David Dunn (Bruce Willis) now runs a security supply shop with his son, Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark), and moonlights as the ponchoed vigilante “The Overseer.” Having followed the news about local kidnappings, David sets out to patrol Philadelphia's industrial district, where he encounters Hedwig, the nine-year-old personality of Split’s Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man with DID (dissociative identity disorder) whose trauma has shaped him into a supremely powerful villain known as The Horde. Following a brief scuffle, The Horde and David are taken into police custody, and the film, having promised a superhero epic, begins anew but this time without the preceding excitement. The majority of the remaining run-time takes place within the panopticon-like Raven Hill Hospital, the institution for the criminally insane where Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) was sent at the end of Unbreakable. Physical altercations at this point are traded in for an altogether different kind of warfare: the mind games waged by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), the examiner put in charge of the three men’s case, who treats them as delusional mental patients, not humans endowed with exceptional abilities.

Glass turns the two decades since the release of Unbreakable into a structuring absence. This third installment in the “Eastrail 177 trilogy” (named after the train that derailed in Unbreakable, killing everyone on board except for David) makes ample room in its 129-minute running time for cameos, callbacks, and visual rhymes that provisionally bind the universes of these otherwise stand-alone films together. Shyamalan reprises his cameos from Unbreakable and Split (in the former as a drug dealer, and in the latter a building manager), telling David, without as much as a wink, that he’s since turned his life around through “positive thinking.” This sequence, and others like it, draw attention to the ad hoc—and thus self-reflexive—construction of this series: production time has become synonymous with narrative time, and the film’s lost years are also those of its director’s.

Since the release of Unbreakable in 2000, comic book media have proliferated in popular culture, on television, and in mainstream cinema. While Elijah was required to explain to David (and by extension, the audience) the mechanics of comic stylings and structure in Unbreakable, his frequent interjections in Glass are essentially superfluous; most audiences will already possess the knowledge required to understand how the film repurposes the genre’s trappings. On a fundamental level, this context limits how Glass operates. Where Unbreakable used deep-space staging, frames within frames, and thematic associations of color to imagine what a modern comic book superhero movie might look like, Glass postures a critique of the studio product that has typified the form in the time since that earlier film’s release.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the film’s three action set-pieces. When The Horde and David face off in a dimly lit, cavernous building, their movements are coherently tracked, their respective blows filmed in close-up to emphasize the physicality of each movement, and their encounter, while not particularly spectacular in comparison to similar scenarios in films of this type, is treated as an intimate, tactile affair; well aware of how superhero movies have been criticized for their weightless action, Shyamalan composes his shots in direct proximity to actors faces or around the source of movement, like two arms clenched around a chest, preparing to lift and drop an opponent. The second set-piece follows Mr. Glass and The Horde as they sneak out of the hospital through a basement corridor; the camera remains in medium close-up on Glass’s curious reaction while The Horde defaces his enemies in the blurry background (video essayists will surely take note of how this values “character over action”). And then there’s the grand finale, foreshadowed to take place at the Osaka Tower (“a true marvel”), yet staged instead in Raven Hill’s parking lot—like a CGI blockbuster, but without the necessary compositing.

By primarily defining Glass in formal, thematic, and ethical opposition to the adaptations he believes have been widely mistaken for the pinnacle of comic book form, Shyamalan here is unable to loosely interpret and interpolate the genre as he did in Unbreakable. The corrupting effects of superhero ubiquity are explicitly illustrated by the opening scene, in which two punks “super-man punch” an innocent bystander, record the attack, and then circulate the images online where others will watch and replicate them. His aesthetic motivated by these self-imposed moral aims, Shyamalan fixes his camera on innocent bystanders during the film’s finale, composes most of the film in close-ups, and integrates a host of returning cast members including Elijah’s mother, David’s son Joseph, and Casey from Split, whose presences suggest the illusion of a much larger film than this one can reasonably withstand. Without engaging viewers in good faith, all of these things can be said to “frustrate” audience expectations—that is, assuming you’re willing to accept being indignantly boring as a form of argument.

Glass and Lady in the Water (2006) are perhaps the only Shyamalan films to outright accept how their characters interpret, frame, and engage with reality. By performing close readings of cereal boxes, crossword puzzles, and an ancient Chinese folk tale, the apartment community in Lady deliver Bryce Dallas Howard’s nymph away from ravenous werewolves back to the world from which she came. If they are to be successful, the artists, stoners, and layabouts in the complex must all take their place within the narrative’s divine architecture: the filmmaker discovers he’s a prophet, misunderstood in his time and rectified after his death, and Bob Balaban’s critic, a symbol for unbelief, is literally fed to the dogs. In Glass, Dr. Staple is designed to plant doubt in characters and audience alike, but her hypothesis is never seriously entertained. Her mannered tone, her use of quasi-scientific language (everything can be explained by injuries to the “frontal lobe”), and her nefarious demeanor (which includes her use of the word “nefarious”), all point to questionable intent. She exists only to affirm the film’s values; her doubt is rarely believed.

Now compare this with 2002’s Signs, among his most moving, ambiguous, and downright terrifying films. Watching a live broadcast of a forthcoming alien invasion, Mel Gibson’s Graham Hess (who lost his faith after his wife died) explains to his family that there are two ways to interpret these images: as evidence that there is someone out there watching over us; or as coincidence, a string of unrelated events that are given meaning by human subjectivity. Although the family is eventually saved by a boy’s asthma, a girl’s aversion to tap water, and the dying words of Graham’s wife (“Swing away!”), these signs of providence are ultimately left for the viewer to interpret. Yes, Signs is a story about a former reverend regaining his faith; yet, depending on one’s perspective, it could also be a horror movie about the very possibility of God existing.

Unbreakable, The Village (2004), and The Happening (2008) follow similar patterns. They establish two possible explanations, one natural the other supernatural (David is or isn’t a superhero; the village is or isn’t guarded by fantastical beasts; there is or isn’t a logical reason for the outbreak), and proceed to question the limits of those explanations. At the end of Unbreakable, when David becomes aware of his abilities, it remains unclear whether or not Elijah’s theory (that if David is a hero, then he has no choice—he must be the villain), framed entirely by comic book ideology, is true. In The Village, which inverts the metaphysical explanations of Unbreakable and Signs, we come to learn that “Those We Don’t Speak Of,” the supernatural entities in the forest, are the creations of the village’s elders, who, profoundly hurt by the modern world, have established a 19th-century protestant-settler haven in the woods. And yet, is the world of The Village not ghastly, even after you know the elders are the ones wearing the masks? Is it not true, as William Hurt’s patriarch so adamantly declares, that the world indeed “moves for love”?

Glass allows for one reading only. Eliminating the ambiguity of Unbreakable, Shyamalan reveals that Kevin’s father was on the same train as David, thus enabling the boy’s mother to abuse him until he transformed into The Horde; that Dr. Staple, far from a skeptic, is part of an ancient, underground, totalitarian group that has prevented the emergence of exceptional beings through mind control or force; and that the many cameras around Raven Hill Hospital have been pre-programmed by Elijah to send the footage of the film’s climax to an off-site server where they can be compiled and eventually distributed to the masses as evidence for the existence of superhuman beings. His master plan coming to fruition, the vindicated Mr. Glass considers his work with his dying breaths. “19 years!” This is Shyamalan’s alternate history. Believe if you must, but take the leap of faith at your own peril.

Jean-Luc Godard once said that the best way to criticize a film was to make another film. It is, perhaps, the great irony of his nearly six-decade career, then, that his work continues to be received in much the same way—with critical essays, reviews, and exegeses written and published post-haste after each film’s festival debut or, with marginally more attention, upon theatrical release. This is not to suggest that such written-word efforts fail to illuminate. But there is something odd about approaching Godard’s late work—particularly his recent collaborations with producer-cinematographer-editor Fabrice Aragno—without a corresponding inclination or means to match their radicality or experimental nature. And coming four years after the director effectively got the final word in with his 3-D masterwork Goodbye to Language (2014), the following is certainly no exception. Still, we try.

Enter The Image Book, a dense, 84-minute video piece that may or may not turn out to be Godard’s swan song. Made in the style of his eight-part, decade-spanning Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98), it premiered at the 71st Cannes Film Festival on the 50th anniversary of May 1968, the events of which had a lasting impact on Godard’s cinema, igniting his efforts with the Dziga Vertov Group and a stated desire to “make political films politically.” The film then won a “Special Palme d’Or” (the first of its kind) from the jury led by Cate Blanchett, who described it as being “almost outside of time and space”—which is fair enough given that it might be as disjunctive and recondite as any film to have ever screened on the Croisette.

Structured around the recurring image of a hand with its index finger raised (a detail cropped from Da Vinci’s St. John the Baptist and then suspended in inky blackness), The Image Book is appropriately split into five chapters, one for each of five fingers. The first, titled “RIM(AK)ES/Remakes,” charts an endless cycle of modern human wars through images of catastrophe, from the mushroom cloud of the atom bomb to the white-hot ending of Robert Aldrich’s noir apocalypse Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Having established something of a zero point, Godard takes the viewer through “St. Petersburg’s Evenings,” tracing a line from extravagance, via an Ophülsian tracking shot across an opulent ballroom (the clip’s low-grade footage smeared and processed almost beyond recognition), to revolution, suggested by glimpses of Dovzhenko’s Soviet masterpiece Earth (1930). From here, the film segues into its most floridly titled chapter (“Those flowers between rails, a confused wind of travels”) and offers up a compendium of iconic Western images of trains—vehicles that have loomed large in the cinematic consciousness ever since the Lumières. There are clips of Keaton’s The General (1926) and von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932), and even the opening of Tourneur’s Berlin Express (1948). It’s in this passage, too, that the mounting, doom-laden sense of unease suffusing the preceding chapters comes to bear. Conceptions of modernity, industry, and positivism are overwhelmed by no less than the night and fog of the Holocaust, a subject Godard has returned to over the course of his career.

If, as Godard intones early on, pledging allegiance to the ideas of Swiss cultural theorist Denis de Rougemont, man’s condition is indeed “to think with hands,” then what happens when cinema subverts or displaces that tactile state? When a hand becomes, as in Godard’s famed aphorism, “not a just image, but just an image”? When real violence becomes conflated with the violence of representation? In a choice that will strike some as crass at best, and exploitative at worst, Godard continually rhymes the two, in one instance placing gruesome footage of ISIS throwing bloodied bodies into the water against the scene in Vertigo (1958) in which Scottie rescues Madeleine from the San Francisco Bay. The ultimate point that Godard arrives at here, though, is fairly direct: which is that cinema—even revolutionary, politically minded cinema—has not clarified, but obscured the reality of the Holocaust and other attendant horrors, and instead contributed to a larger confusion, an effective “flattening” of reality. (That the clenched fist of revolution is here traded in for a raised index finger is instructive.) Whether one finds Godard’s rhetoric persuasive or not, the nature of that reality, as founded on the violence and corruption of Western society (the subject of the fourth chapter, “Spirit of Law”), is harder to deny.

It’s in the fifth and final movement, though, that these ideas gain their fullest expression. Named after Michael Snow’s La Région centrale (1971)—a landmark conceptual achievement that upends a craggy Québécois landscape in a series of dizzying mechanistic permutations—this chapter presents an imagistic corpus of “Joyful Arabia” that departs from Western representations such as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Arabian Nights (1974). Excerpts of films hailing from the region itself appear alongside DV footage of coastal vistas and news clips of the Arab Spring. Accompanying the images are uncontextualized verbal passages, some of which—primarily those that speak of “Ben Kadem” and “Samantar”—are drawn from Egyptian writer Albert Cossery's Une Ambition dans le Désert, a 1984 novel about a fictitious state on the Persian Gulf previously untouched by conflict due to its territorial lack of oil. Furthering his previous argument regarding cinema’s capacity to obfuscate, Godard thus establishes a kind of alternative history that, especially for viewers unfamiliar with his chosen source texts and images and unmoored by the chapter’s departure from the Western canon, might seem like an actual one—which is as scathing an indictment of tourist-trap ignorance as one could imagine.

“Can the Arabs speak?” a voice asks part-way through, an obtuse statement that here nonetheless resonates with the knowledge of how “the central region” has often been viewed. As the title card “Archaeology and Pirates” reminds us, the (Western) history of the Middle East is one of plunder and ill-gotten gain, not just of wealth (in the form of oil) but also an entire tradition of images and iconography. Expounding on the latter, Godard mulls over the contrast between the violence of the act of representation and the eerie “calmness” of the representation itself. So even as Godard constructs what is nothing if not a representation of the Middle East, he draws attention to the tenuousness of his position—which is, if not an outright rebuke, then at least self-critical acknowledgment of Orientalist impulses that go back as far as La Chinoise (1967). Not for nothing do the words “under Western eyes” recur twice, emphasizing the distance between the merely seen and truly felt.

Near The Image Book’s beginning, a voice proffers, “Nothing is as handy as a text.” With reference to the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Torah—sacred texts that have engendered centuries of conflict—Godard later seems to ask: at what cost? And after all, The Image Book is itself a kind of (un)holy tome, a bombastic attempt at creating a definitive imagistic history. An insert of The Complete Works of Alexandre Dumas would posit that a compendium of words and letters, though certainly fraught and prone to error, is achievable. But when it comes to images, is such effort possible? Is it even desirable? By drawing attention to the mutability of the images themselves, Godard’s distinctive legerdemain would seem to suggest otherwise.

Clips culled from cinema and reportage flicker and transform before one’s eyes in a barrage of changing aspect ratios, contrast levels, and color saturation intensities; gnomic pronouncements and aphorisms (some translated, others not) boom and crackle over a detailed 7.1 sound mix. Fulfilling a remark that “counterpoint is the discipline of superimposition,” frames are juxtaposed, distorted, equated and thus challenged, questioned, mistrusted. What Godard attempts here is something akin to what Michael Snow achieved with La Région centrale, albeit with an entirely different approach—that is, to reorient a viewer’s sense of space and thus defamiliarize the world anew. After all, images of war, violence, and destruction are things we should never have gotten used to in the first place; Godard’s project merely restores the requisite sense of disquiet.

In a diatribe against the “bloody morons” running the world, Godard asks: “Why dream of being king, when one could dream of being Faust?” If the storied director’s own deal with the Devil was “a transmutation of reality” over the course of a prolific career, then his latest is both the fulfillment and fallout of such a bargain—an attempt to grapple with what it would truly mean for a region, a history, an entire reality to be distilled into a set of images compiled for “handy” perusal. Twisting the knife somewhat, Godard makes his case against such ends while locating genuine beauty within them. There are two images here as magisterial as any in Godard’s long career: of luminous coastal waves floating across the frame, backed by an emerald-clear sky; and of a rolling lakeside vista of astonishing blue, with a sky-full of cumuli reflected over a hyaline-clear expanse. It's no coincidence that both are images of water, a motif that recurs in Goodbye to Language as the embodiment of the nothingness (and thus the purity) of nature, unencumbered by man.

So how then are we to take The Image Book? Brecht’s dictum that “in reality, only a fragment carries a mark of authenticity” is as close as the film comes to a definitive answer, positing an atomized view detached from a broader determination. This may be more confounding and uncertain, but perhaps more truthful to the pluralities of the world as it exists. For just as Goodbye to Language acknowledged—no, embodied—our inability to function without the structures (symbolic, semiotic) and hierarchies (ideological, cultural) that make up our specific existence and which come part and parcel with language, The Image Book does so with a visual lexicon of which cinema is but a part. Godard merely foregrounds his individual preoccupations with cinema and the Middle East—that is, how he views the world—instead of the human fact of stereoscopic vision to make this broader argument. After all, how else does one experience the world if not as negotiated by the specificities of one’s existence? To hold otherwise would be fraudulent. Entirely fitting then, that the closing excerpt, taken from the first episode of Max Ophüls’s Le plaisir (1952), observes an old man donning a mask of youth and taking part in a breathless, doomed quadrille. Here one recalls the director’s maxim: “Life is movement.” The man collapses; the screen cuts to black. Still, we try.

Let us presume for the moment that the end of the world really is nigh. Let us suppose that it isn’t going to be a peaceful chiliastic bail-out, but an end self-imposed by cupidity and negligence and sybaritic stupidity, and that it will be terrible and painful, perhaps experienced by many even now living on the planet. Let us suppose that Paul Schrader, the always Cassandra-like writer-director of First Reformed (2017), is on the money when he states, as he did in a recent interview, that “the odds of our species outliving the century are not very strong,” and that the best we can hope for is that “whoever comes after us, whatever life form or silicone-based life form that is, they’re gonna have a hell of a museum.” Putting all else aside, what might the last room in that museum look like? What should art look like made with the understanding that it might be among the last art being made by human hands?

One possible answer to this question lies in the work of the Quebecois bricolage artist Dominic Gagnon. Gagnon works in the medium of the collage film—we’ll use the term for historical purposes, though celluloid has nothing to do with his practice—a medium that is perhaps particularly if not solely suited to embodying the sensation of social and cultural breakdown, of being buried underneath an avalanche of detritus. Bruce Conner, in the 1950s best known as a scavenger-sculptor and one of the innovators of the modern collage film along with the Canadian Arthur Lipsett, produced a landmark work with his A Movie; a tissue of automotive chaos, odd exotica, softcore cheesecake, athletic novelties, collapsing bridges, aerial warfare, a burning Hindenburg, and the occasional mushroom cloud, it was finished in 1958, shortly before Conner retreated with his wife and child to Mexico in order to avoid what he was certain was an imminent nuclear holocaust. More recently, the collage film has entered a new renaissance period thanks to ready access to home video, online user-generated content distribution platforms, and nonlinear editing systems, allowing for the drubbing derangement of, say, Derrick Beckles’s TV Carnage (1996-) trash television trawls.

Gagnon has been making films for some 20 years, and for at least a decade now has been using uploaded found footage culled from YouTube as his raw material, the first of these works that I’m familiar with being 2009’s RIP inPieces America, a litany of webcam testimonials united in their having been “flagged for content” and by their air of political disillusion, paranoia regarding Deep State autocracy, and apocalyptic presentiments, with primarily male speakers advising the stockpiling of food and arms in the face of the coming crackdown. Since then he has made works focused on North American women in survivalist mode (2011’s Pieces and Love All to Hell), a parade of online odds-and-ends set to the pronouncements of Guy Debord (2012’s Society’s Space), and teenagers anticipating Armageddon (2014’s Hoax_Canular), an ongoing encyclopedia of imagery of a civilization suspended between Singularity and Spectacle. Presently he is at work on a tetralogy, of which Going South is the second part, following his 2016 of the North—the idea, presumably, is to round the compass. The previous film was comprised largely of footage submitted by users in the Arctic Circle, the majority of them Inuit—the title recalls Robert Flaherty’s pioneering work of documentary ethnography Nanook of the North (1922), but operating from the remove of broadband, Gagnon effectively eliminated the physical presence of the interloping observer-outsider.

Going South is not so geographically specific as its predecessor, though its recurring scenes of palm trees engulfed in flames do lend a somewhat more tropical air to this travelogue that takes us from Miami Beach to Mozambique, from Hurricane Sandy to Hurricane Wilma. Rather than any single latitude, the imagery here locates us generally in the vague terrain of vacation, retreat, getaway—there is merriment on waterslides, bros in wetsuits barfing up the contents of beer bongs, and a nude woman well into middle age being airbrush body-painted before strolling the precincts of a Fantasy Fest street fair in Key West. Very often, though, there is trouble in paradise, with things found going terribly awry on account of either environmental catastrophe, human incompetence, or a combination of the two. A cruise ship swimming pool is seen sloshing about in choppy waters; parasailers are blown off-course by an incoming storm; airplanes are disturbed by incoherent and insurgent passengers or witnessed in the process of crash landing protocol. Between these vignettes, there gradually coheres an ensemble cast of characters made up of various YouTube vloggers who reappear throughout the film, some of them connected to the travel and leisure industry—a Charlotte, North Carolina-based flight attendant seen guiding her some 47K followers through the contents of her grocery bag, or Andy Mallon, a splenetic middle-aged American expat in Bangkok who dispenses advice as to how to kibbitz with the local bar girls without losing your heart and wallet. (He also, it transpires, hawks his own line of Teespring products.)

While pointing toward equatorial climes, the title also holds a double meaning—Going South as in to deteriorate, to go downhill, to decline and fall. In the space of six chapters introduced by on-screen titles like “dear haters” and “Flat earth theory”—the latter a reference to a clip posted by YouTuber The Real Merkabah, describing with credulity the possibility that the spherical globe is an illuminati-administered sham—we traverse the planet and even travel out into the stars, but find precious little to inspire high hopes for the future of humankind. Self-improvement and self-realization is much spoken of by several of our vloggers, but jumping between confessional entries, what we actually see is a Sisyphean sort of struggle, a process of incremental gains and inevitable backslides. One fortysomething man, self-described on his channel as your “average night owl tattooed music lovin’ car salesmen computer guy... recovering alcoholic, battling anxiety and alcoholism” is seen voicing firm resolutions in between losing his battles time and again. Chloe Arden, a Canadian transgendered teenager, is seen vacillating between euphoric highs of empowerment (“You gotta do what makes you happy because in the end you’ve only got yourself”) and troughs of long-dark-nights-of-the-soul despair, unloosing a depressive soliloquy in a Walmart parking lot and voicing the great conundrum of our times: “I just, like, want more… subscribers, to be honest. I just want a bigger audience.”

Gagnon has not merely laid clips end-on-end here; he is often found suturing different pieces together so as to make them appear to be occurring in the same space, as when the partying of the beer bong bros seems to be interrupted by the goblin-like gibbering of a woman, viewed only as a twitching hand reaching from what appears to be a bathroom door—in fact sourced from an entirely different YouTube clip labeled “Venice Beach Female Transient Freaking & Tweaking On Crack + Heroin.” He routinely lets audio from one clip spill onto the video from another, as when Arden’s monologuing about her coming out plays over Spring Break Nationals Bikini Contest footage; or a confessional from a YouTuber named RV Debs discussing the death of her husband is placed over the Key West party-time footage, creating the false impression that the woman strolling around nude is a recent widow; or when the transient gibbering carries over onto a clip titled “New Guinea Tribes meets white people first time.” (Given what we’ve seen of Western civilization up to this point, the encounter seems a mixed blessing at best.)

To grind unsuspecting men and women into the raw meat of collage is at bottom an ethically dicey proposition—I have long been troubled by a passage in one of Robert Warshow’s essays, “Re-Viewing the Russian Movies,” in which that son of a Russian Jewish immigrant muses of the masters of Soviet montage: “They would have made a handsome montage of my corpse too, and given it a meaning—their meaning and not mine.” Gagnon’s subjects aren’t corpses, of course—they’ve all willingly cast their images out into the Internet ether—but this doesn’t diminish the feeling of there being something almost anti-human in his work, which one imagines being assembled alone in a dank garret by the disheveled artist, toying with his specimens while hunched over a souped-up Macbook.

On one hand I suspect that conjuring this image has a great deal to do with reflecting my own misanthropy onto the artist; on another, I am very far from being convinced that being anti-human is an invalid artistic stance. What I can speak with certainty of, however, is the wicked ingenuity of Gagnon’s craftsmanship. In each clip he is extremely attentive in choosing his introduction and exit points, and as a result they have an almost conversational flow from one to the next. A health-and-wellness raw foods zealot finishes a tour of his spartan apartment with a shot of a book comparing the “Parallel Sayings” of Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, & Lao Tzu, concluding: “People believe in their beliefs but they don’t really believe in what they know because you only know what you know, you know?” This is followed by GoPro footage from a NASA spacewalk that looks out on the curvature of the planet, which is itself followed by a return to The Real Merkabah’s discussion of flat earth theory: “No matter high up you go, when you’re in a building you could be on the 20th, 30th, 40th floor, when you look out the window you see a straight horizon…”

The reappearance of flat earth theory in discourse is dependent on the same increasingly widespread skepticism towards any and all official or expert explanations that has allowed for the proliferation of the conspiracy-minded types who populate RIP in Pieces America, or those who insist on finding ulterior motives behind the science of global warming, even as the ice caps melt—another image that runs through Going South, inviting one to wonder just how long the many beaches we see will remain open for debauchery. Gagnon’s collage offers us a panoramic view of a human race convinced of salvation through the self, including and especially through the optimal monetization of personal branding and validation via metrics, while its shared home dies for want of collective action, mankind unable to find common cause in preserving the environment due to an increasingly epidemic mistrust in any passed down knowledge that isn’t derived from firsthand experience. In the end you’ve only got yourself! You only know what you know, you know?

Without leaving the comfort of his own browser, Gagnon has made a film cosmic in scope, including material that could be taken as his own gloss on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), shuttling as he does between outer space and prehistory, albeit a prehistory of a very contemporary sort. This comes via Virginian octogenarian gamer Shirley Curry’s recordings of her first-person play of the video game Ark: Survival Evolved, which spawns players naked and alone on the shore of a Jurassic beach, addressing an audience of her “grandkids.” (“I’ll see you in the next episode,” she signs off, “when it’s time for me to die again.”), or a clip titled “GTA Vacation Ruined” submitted by penguinz0, a 24-year-old YouTuber who’s attained online celebrity for his narration of game walkthrough footage, here a mordant chimpanzee offering a dry commentary while mowing down humans with a chain gun in a Grand Theft Auto V cityscape, an image to confound any Darwinian idea of species progress.

More than 40 years after the Sex Pistols declared “No Future,” the legacy of punk and hardcore—as an ethos if not as a codified music—remains both omnipresent and squabbled over. This can be found in the renewed attention to the corpus of Mark “K-Punk” Fisher, or in the recent titling of two movements, “Nicecore” and “Hopepunk,” pitched to conflict-averse middle-class-and-up liberals seeking to #resist renascent right-wing nationalism with snuggly goodwill, coinages seemingly oblivious to the actual provenance of punk, which was neither particularly nice nor hopeful. Gagnon, on the other hand, makes work that’s legitimately punk as fuck—bleak, scabrous, and resounding with a madman’s cackle. Watching Going South, I was reminded of some of the most nihilistic of the punk-adjacent music—of Maryland weirdoes No Trend and their howl of “Too many humans—you breed like rats, and you’re no fucking better,” or Akron, Ohio’s Devo, with whom Conner, returned from his Mexican sojourn and submerged in the Bay Area punk scene in the late ’70s, would collaborate, producing a proto-music video for their “Mongoloid.” A tribute to the modern Cro-Magnon in a Gray Flannel Suit, “Mongoloid” was an illustration of the doctrine of “De-evolution” that both shaped Devo’s work and gave the band their name. Founded on a basic rejection of narratives of human advancement, it’s a philosophy that the band member Gerald V. Casale, writing in a 2018 “Open Letter” published in Noisey, believed vindicated by recent events. Of our de-evolved present, Casale states:

“Presently, the fabric that holds a society together has shredded in the wind. Everyone has their own facts, their own private Idaho stored in their expensive cellular phones. The earbuds are in, the feedback loops are locked, and the Frappuccino’s [sic] are flowing freely. Social media provides the highway straight back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The restless natives react to digital shadows on the wall, reduced to fear, hate, and superstition. There are climate change deniers, and there are even more who think that the climate is being maliciously manipulated by corporate conglomerates owned by the Central Bank to achieve global control of resources and wealth.”

This last bit comes rather close to something you might hear from one of the subjects in Gagnon’s RIP in Pieces America, and looking to define what Gagnon is after in Going South, you could do much worse than Casale’s screed. And though Gagnon sometimes may seem to ridicule his subjects, on another level his work is at one with them in sharing their sense of impending doom. Summarizing his approach to the collage film, the words of one of RIP in Pieces America’s stars will do quite nicely. “It’s like a goddamn puzzle, man,” says the young man, direct-addressing the camera with an expression of fierce exasperation. “All the pieces are scattered out. Once you put them shits together, you come up with a picture, man. And I’m startin’ to come up with a fucked-up picture. For real.”

The Disappearance of Goya plays January 20 as part of Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look 2019.

The 1975–1990 civil war that ripped Lebanon’s social fabric apart and left the country in fragments is a recurring topic in its national cinema, almost to a monothematic extent. The reasons for this narrative fixation are many and manifold. The war and its wounds are still relatively fresh, virtually every family in Lebanon having suffered a loss or at the very least having been displaced. The internecine conflict that traumatically altered the precarious balance of Lebanon’s multi-ethnic and multi-confessional makeup was won by no one, in neither military nor political terms.

In the absence of a clear victor, nobody got to write the history of the struggle (something winners inevitably take upon themselves). Warring factions, and there were many, formally agreed to halt the fighting—with weapons at least. Maronites were stripped of some of the colonial privileges they were granted under French rule, though to reduce the Lebanese civil war to a religious conflict would be a gross (and dangerous) oversimplification. Many of the intricate dynamics at play during the long and bloody war have by no means been resolved, let alone pacified. And the sectarian divisions (institutionalized by the French) that the war exasperated and further entrenched still dominate the political life of this tiny Mediterranean nation. Lebanese schools do not adopt a unified history textbook, which means that recent national history remains a disputed territory. The first generation born after the civil war has now come of age and it is precisely to this generation that the director of The Disappearance of Goya belongs. Toni Geitani’s debut feature focuses on the evanescence of historical and national memory as experienced by the first generation that did not see corpses lying in the streets but grew up surrounded by their ghosts.

The discursive opacity and formal open-endedness of The Disappearance of Goya are the plastic outcome of a subject matter that cannot be possibly dealt with linearly. No cohesive or coherent plot can emerge from the fog of a disputed memory and none in fact unfolds from Geitani’s film, which opens with a recorded interview with the Druze leader Walid Jumblat, head of the Progressive Socialist Party. The interview, conducted by a French journalist, presumably dates back to 1982 when the Mountain War (Harb al-Jabal), one of the many subconflicts of the Civil War, broke out. This war within a war, which took place in the Chouf region southeast of Beirut, saw a coalition of leftist and Muslim-majority formations led by Jumblatt’s party pitted against the Lebanese Armed Forces and the Christian Lebanese Forces. A drone shot, possibly filmed over the very same slopes where fighting had once taken place, pans by to take us in front of an anthropomorphic figure (something in-between Nosferatu and Freddy Krueger). Endowed with a raspy robotic voice, the creature starts describing the famous painting by Francisco Goya El tre de mayo en Madrid, in which a man with his arms open is facing the firing squad, his face frozen into surprised imploration traversed by a streak of resignation at his impending death. From the way he describes the painting—“the light propagates on the initial victim and then moves on to the future martyrs”—he could almost be mistaken for its author. Later in his monologue the mysterious figure, whose name he confesses to be Ghassan, recounts an event that took place on April 3 1983, when he was tasked with staging a fake execution, by photographic means. “I had nothing to do with any of them,” Ghassan points out, referring to the various players involved in the war, meticulously listing them one by one. This mystery person was only a hired cameraman (though it remains unclear how willingly). Once he took the photograph of the fake execution after having carefully choreographed it, the actors, to his aghast surprise, were shot for real. At which point the spectator might ask herself what is the difference between a real and a staged execution. The photo of the “fake” shooting bears a striking similarity to Goya’s abovementioned painting.

From this image, which materializes later in the film in different forms, The Disappearance of Goya dissipates into a cloud of symbolic allusions and self-reflexive interludes. Notably among the former is the body of a female performer wrapped in a green screen onto which images of the conflict are projected alongside a soundscape composed by the director himself. Later in the film we see the crew discussing their second-hand memories of war, sharing their families’ stories of exile, resilience, and mourning.

The contours of these stories, very much like the staged photo at the allegorical center of the film, are hazy, as is the structure of the film, which fuses multimedia art with cinema to not always convincing results. The Disappearance of Goya at times feels like a rehearsal—albeit one permeated by potential to be sure. Then again, the film’s hypothetical form and tone are intimately connected to the speculative essence of its conjectures and spectral evocations. Nothing is ever taken or given for granted aesthetically: the line that divides verisimilitude from fiction, history from its endless versions, is not even meant to be seen. Geitani’s film solely relies on fictional testimony. The place of memory in relation to the Lebanese Civil War has been a point of cinematographic contention since filmmakers started trying to make sense of the senseless agony of fratricidal killing. Rather than something to be assembled and preserved, national and historical memory in Lebanon is a cursed apparition, a chimerical delusion at best. In a country where there are still thousands of unaccounted disappeared the ghost is more than a simple cinematographic pretext—its allegorical dimension in Lebanese cinema acquires a realistic quality.

Curious and telling in this regard is the “consultant” credit of Ghassan Salhab in The Disappearance of Goya. Salhab’s Phantom Beirut (1998), the story of a man who returns to Beirut after having faked his own death during the war, can in fact be considered the progenitor of Lebanese cinema’s hauntological strand, one now bound to be explored by a new generation that was spared the bloodshed, but not its far-reaching consequences.

]]>2018: Two Centshttp://www.reverseshot.org/archive/entry/2533/two_cents_2019
http://www.reverseshot.org/archive/entry/2533/two_cents_2019featureSat, 19 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0500
Years in Review
Best (?) Ensembles: Support the Girls and The 15:17 to Paris
It seems counterintuitive to pair a fleet, heartfelt ensemble piece about work and empathy with a high-wire acting experiment that astral projects into the uncanny valley, yet here we are: both Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls and Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris exude a comparably impressive level of trust in their actors. Support the Girls is structured by unpredictable emotional detours and escalations, all of which a brilliantly nuanced Regina Hall must absorb while managing and nurturing her staff, for whom she acts as a human shield against a daily grind of casual racism and sexism. It relies on the chameleonic anonymity of “character actors” rather than star personas: the story would collapse on itself if its performers could not believably substantiate and shoulder its depiction of mental and physical labor—which, to a great extent, involves performance and masking. At a detailed but breakneck 90 minutes, throwaway lines must incisively message subtext; hardly an expression, an exhalation, or a tonality is wasted. But when the film pauses, the performers deepen the silence. In one telling, sweet non sequitur, Hall sits outside, and, letting her defenses down, calls out to birds flying overhead.

The 15:17 to Paris, on the other hand, is a bizarre mélange that defies words like “uneven” or “successful.” It studies the idea of playing oneself, with non-actors Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, and Spencer Stone appearing in a dramatic adaptation of their own true-life thwarting of a terrorist shooting onboard a train in France. Its opening chapter, a sort of origin story sequence, introduces them as children played by young actors, before the real-life trio is air-dropped into the narrative alongside the same people who played their parents in flashback, cosmetically unchanged to account for the time cut (watching these men call Judy Greer or Jenna Fischer “mom” is pure Brechtian edginess). It’s palpable that they are trying to perform for Eastwood’s story: self-consciously, imperfectly, but in an effort to be faithful to some version of something that they lived. The train sequence succeeds most conventionally on the rubric of classical narrative seamlessness, with each guy locking into an action hero interpretation that feels integrated into a familiar genre format. But the fact that its buildup consists of stilted, banal, and often quite funny Eurotrip scenes twists those recollections into something hyperreal. Intentional or otherwise, these collisions make the film one of the most mesmerizing and discomfiting experiences in recent memory. Both films are preoccupied with finding some truth in experience: one making brilliant use of a conventional repertory toolkit to do so; the other shattering authenticity with an uncontrolled and often tense conceit. In both of those settings, there’s also a sense of good faith that their performers can lead the way. —Chloe Lizotte

Best Musical: Jeannette, the Childhood of Joan of Arc
Mary Poppins, Freddie Mercury, Ally Maine . . . Joan of Arc? Seemingly out to conquer every maligned genre under the sun, French misanthrope turned cinematic court jester Bruno Dumont took on perhaps his greatest challenge yet with Jeannette, the Childhood of Joan of Arc, an outrageous and inspired musical restaging of the early years of France’s most famous martyr. For Dumont, no time-honored tradition is too sacred: Who needs chops when you have heart (not to mention the spirit of the Lord coursing through the soul of your main character)? Who needs the magic of movies when you have a pair of dancing nuns? Liberated from the constraints of art-house austerity, Dumont has found fresh ways to energize stale formulas, with Jeannette standing as arguably the most singular and focused of his recent comedic dalliances. And in Lise Leplat Prudhomme, the younger of the film’s two Jeannettes, he’s found a Joan to stand alongside those of Falconetti and Bergman. Singing and swaying her way into the foreground in the film’s opening shot, she arrives like a vision, fully formed. Et voilà, a star is born. —Jordan Cronk

Best Supporting Actor: Brian Tyree Henry
If the mark of a great supporting actor is an ability to create lives in miniature, using a few pages of dialogue and a handful of shooting days to signal the complexity and completeness of a life that one’s lead peers have an entire movie to evoke, then it’s difficult to imagine a more valuable one from this past year than Brian Tyree Henry. Henry doesn’t exploit his abbreviated material for maximum impact or lunge for attention, but rather inhabits his briefly glimpsed personages to the fullest. In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Henry invested weary, conflicted emotion in the poignant apologies of the hero’s patrolman father. In Widows, he brought dapper venality to the underutilized role of a Chicago kingpin-turned-politician, cutting his miscast scene partner Colin Farrell down to size with one flick of his steely gaze, making him look every bit the empty suit. However, these films were just precursors to the main event: Henry’s 12-minute performance in If Beale Street Could Talk as Daniel, a recently incarcerated man still traumatized by the horrors of his years behind bars. Any actor worth his salt can make do with the sublime eloquence of both Barry Jenkins and James Baldwin. Henry’s vocal delivery is exquisite—there’s a world of thought in each word he utters—but it’s the silent physicality of his approach that allows him to transcend the shortness of his screen time. He knows and trusts in the expressive power of a purposeful pause and the unspoken depths that a performer can summon through stillness; when Daniel goes quiet, lost in a memory too terrible to put into words, Henry, stock-still in invasive close-up, opens up a portal into the bottomless desolation of a man who has lost the will to be outraged, shamed into silence by a world that has rendered his outrage futile. That the actor filmed these projects more or less consecutively with his stereotype-burning tour de force on Donald Glover’s Atlanta, his Tony-nominated turn in Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero, and bit parts in movies like Hotel Artemis and White Boy Rick heralds the arrival of a new master, one deserving of a spotlight all his own. —Matthew Eng

Best Mise-en-scène: Unfriended: Dark Web
One of the most terrifying things about living a life on social media is the feeling of constant exposure—the sense that hiding behind avatars and pseudonyms and Skype chats and Twitter feeds has somehow, conversely, made us more vulnerable. It’s not necessarily that we’re always being watched—it’s that we now constantly feel seen. Scarier, funnier, and more narratively clever than its already impressive predecessor, the latest in the Unfriended franchise (please let there be more!) exploits this strange paranoia. Like Game Night with an added layer of nerve-jangling, real-world danger, Dark Web raises the stakes and then some, charting in real time the emotional and physical destruction of a relatively pleasant young man who, we come to realize, has made one fatal error: absconding with a laptop at a café that hadn’t been claimed. He and his affable roundelay of friends thus become the pawns in an elaborate deadly con that takes them deeper and deeper into moral darkness and physical danger. That all of this takes place on one screen in one allegedly unbroken take (a meticulously constructed trick that gives off the sense of unceasing, single-minded flow and panic), told through Facebook chats and Skype groups and sinister videos buried in secret folders, makes the whole thing feel both narratively urgent and a genuine reflection of 21st-century screen addiction. —Michael Koresky

Best New Old Movies1. The Other Side of the Wind
“Netflix presents… An Orson Welles Picture.” Thus begins The Other Side of the Wind, suggesting the odd image of the larger-than-life wunderkind of 20th-century Hollywood and the 21st-century’s one company industry-unto-itself traveling through time to rendezvous in the fashionably bleak atmosphere of late ’70s L.A. As in many of Welles’s pictures, the narrative is pieced together from the fragments of a fallen idol; but true to the film’s fixation on proliferating cameras, each with an angle of its own, The Other Side of the Wind reduces its legendary director figure Jake Hannaford (John Huston) to a dyspeptic member of his own Greek chorus. Cut by Bob Murawski with little regard for temporal continuity, the film takes the form of a hyperverbal fugue, with the makeshift community at Hannaford’s party coming across like a single consciousness doing battle against itself. One of the Welles movies inclined towards instability—more Mr. Arkadin or The Trial than The Magnificent Ambersons—The Other Side of the Wind is centered on manifold conflicts. These take place both within the story and on the level of form, with a dissonant jostling of competing film stocks, aspect ratios, and layers of fiction, ultimately amounting to a bad vibes confrontation between the very real hang-ups of the old generation and the much longed for, possibly illusory freedoms of the new. Welles set out to document an end of an era, but the strange liminal moment he captured might not yet have passed. —Daniel Witkin

2. Personal Problems
For me, 2018 was the Year of Bill Gunn: I spent so much of these past twelve months in awe of his work and cursing the system that suppressed it for so long. I don’t seek to paint him as some unsung hero of Black cinema or tragic figure unable to see the impact of his filmmaking during his lifetime. I am, however, here to fully sing the praises of a genius. Although created in collaboration with Ishmael Reed for public access TV in the late 1970s, Personal Problems was only given a proper release this year after languishing on videotape, at the time a new form and an accessible tool for storytelling. A Black soap opera following the life of Harlem Hospital nurse Johnnie Mae Brown, this is a work of ingenuity, part docudrama, part music video, with sprinkles of absurdity throughout; the by-any-means necessary approach to the filmmaking and limitations of the format on which it’s shot lend it an experimental feel. We see Johnnie Mae at brunch with her girlfriends, drinking wine, cutting up. They talk about love, their hospital jobs, and their finances. The overlap in conversation seems too organic to be written, offering a rare instance in which we’re allowed to see Black female characters outside of a gaze that presumes to know our innermost thoughts. Then there’s the conversation at the breakfast table, in which she, her husband, and her father-in-law try to recall the playwright and plot of A Raisin in the Sun; it’s a botched attempt at a teachable moment before her husband squanders his own hard-earned dough in a business venture. “I ain’t never heard of no raisin’ in no sun!” Personal Problems is a piece of work that seeks not to be the Black version of anything but a world in and of itself, which only someone named Johnnie Mae Brown could occupy and share with us. —Tayler Montague

3. Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day
Arriving stateside over four decades after its initial broadcast on German television, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day made the year’s slate of U.S. theatrical releases look even more paltry than usual. Comprised of five episodes running a total of eight hours, the miniseries was made after the director's pivotal discovery of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, during a period of creative efflorescence that produced The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972) and Ali:Fear Eats the Soul (1974). No less formally accomplished or gloriously realized than those masterpieces, Eight Hours also has the distinction of being Fassbinder’s most optimistic work, touchingly hopeful regarding man’s capacity for betterment. Bearing the subtitle “A Family Series,” it’s an unmistakably popular entertainment that concedes nothing in terms of cinematic construction, making it clear that boundaries of taste—between, say, TV melodrama and avant-garde theater—are perhaps not so insurmountable after all. Of this, there’s no better illustration than the tour de force, half-hour wedding celebration that concludes Part IV. (Among other things, it contains, after Bitter Tears, yet another superb use of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”) In the span of a workday, Fassbinder creates the work of a lifetime. —Lawrence Garcia

Best Movies That Every American Needs to See Right This Second (So Where Are They?): Bisbee ’17 and El mar la mar
Remember last week, when our highest-ranking executive wanted to address the nation with his usual scurrilous stream of scare tactics and racist falsehoods, and the networks seemed tentative about allowing so much as a rebuttal or a fact-check? Rather than have one or, as it eventually happened, two speakers from the other party respond, I'd have been just as happy to see Robert Greene’s Bisbee ‘17 or Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki's El mar la mar beamed into every U.S. household. These two border-focused documentaries don’t just evoke entirely divergent histories, ideologies, and dare-I-call-them facts from what 45 set forth (or ever sets forth). They also embody totally different templates for how you persuade someone, how you contemplate a place and its legacies, how you engage other people's mindfulness, how you hold a space authoritatively without pretending to have all the answers, how you insist: “We've been here before!”

Bisbee ‘17, with its intricate blendings of vérité and reenactment, and El mar la mar, with its poetic refusal of exposition and its eccentric relations of sound and image, furnished stunning rejoinders this year not just to our elected propagandists and hapless morning-show ringleaders but to more timid forms of documentary that continue to reap commercial and critical fortunes. It's okay, and in many cases preferable, if the “truths” you learn from nonfiction cinema are emotional as well as archival, or if one central truth is that most stories worth telling live amidst a perpetual jostle of competing perspectives. Bisbee, the year's best movie about who will or won't be whose neighbor, tracks what happens as a once-thriving Arizona mining town restages a historical episode of xenophobic, racist, and anti-Left purging, which eventually found brothers packing brothers into boxcars and launching them out of Bisbee into a barely survivable desert. Exhuming this incident as living theater alternately solidifies and undermines different people’s (or sometimes the same people’s) certainties about what to think and feel. A final, climactic exit marks both a crystallized act of protest and a helpless, ineffable buckling under too much past and too much present. El mar la mar refuses to show us faces of the recent border crossers, the border patrols, the borderland residents, the checkpoint detainees, and the other eyewitnesses of that ever more overdetermined tract of American landscape and mindscape; blocked from relying on semiotics of appearance, the audience must really listen to these testimonies, hanging on every narrative turn, every inflection of ambiguous sympathy. Meanwhile, the sun-blasted objects onscreen, backpacks and sunglasses and water bottles lensed in situ in the Sonoran desert, incline oppositely: visually evocative, intractably mute, surviving footnotes to memoirs already lost.

These movies should be playing everywhere. For now, because of our feeble infrastructures for showcasing documentary (especially when executed so adventurously), they are virtually nowhere. Watch the skies in 2019 for news of streaming releases . . . or, in the spirit of action, maybe write to a filmmaker or distributor or librarian or nearby programmer and figure out how to get these much-needed texts into your town, and under local discussion. That’s what I did. Be the change you want to see, people! —Nick Davis

Most Misleading Title:Lean on PeteLeast Misleading Title: 24 Frames

Most Irritating Camera Lens: The Favourite
Extreme wide angle lenses are not categorically awful. Probably the best use of a fish-eye lens is, fittingly, 2012’s GoPro-shot Leviathan, in which the effect is purposefully disorienting, plunging the viewer into the alien world of deep sea commercial fishing as experienced at a fisherman’s wrist, flung across a slimy deck, or lifted by a pole into a cluster of chum-mad seagulls. What can an extreme wide angle do for a “fun” but ultimately flat period drama filled with lusty intrigue, female rivalry, the machinations of state power, and some quirky animal stuff? The answer is nothing. Not that such a lens couldn’t work; it’s just that Yorgos Lanthimos doesn’t do anything remotely interesting with it. If lenses could talk, the 6mm one used in The Favourite might say something like this: “Hey!! Look at me!!! Look at these beautiful people! I scrunched everyone up so that they’re UGLY. You like it?? I’m DIFFERENT! Look at this palace! It’s so big and weird, like rich people’s houses are. I WARPED it. Get it??!! Because this is a WARPED WORLD. BOOM.” —Genevieve Yue

Most Nauseating Cinematography: At Eternity’s Gate
One would have assumed that Julian Schnabel’s experiments with perspective and trammeled camera movement would have reached their natural end point with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, in which we’re wedded to the point of view of a man with locked-in syndrome. Alas you know you’re in trouble from the start of his Vincent van Gogh biopic when he and his DP Benoit Delhomme introduce us to a shepherdess in a sun-dappled field; through van Gogh’s eyes we see her through a yellow-tinted bifocal that has the effect of making half the screen look like it’s been dunked in piss. (Is this how an artist sees?) Just a little later, the camera is bobbing and weaving indiscriminately, in and out and around Willem Dafoe’s van Gogh and Oscar Isaac’s Paul Gauguin as they carouse on the streets of Arle, which has the effect of making actors trying to act “period” seem like they’re trying to avoid being clobbered on the head by the camera. (Is this how an artist feels?) Schnabel’s film is admirably preoccupied with light and texture and the experience of an artist’s work, though the camera tricks prevent it from being at all immersive, making one yearn for the painterly reverence of Minnelli or the perverse borderlines of Pialat. —MK

Best Action Sequence: The Commuter
It’s always a treat when a new Mission: Impossible film arrives in theaters. What better summery confection is there than our most successful ongoing cinematic action franchise continually allowing our best ongoing action star new ways to exercise his obvious self-loathing death wish? That said, even though Mission: Impossible—Fallout arrived on time in late summer and Tom Cruise was appropriately bruised and battered about, all of its set pieces (even a quite insane bit with small helicopters) had already been topped way back in January at the climax of Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Commuter, which sends a Metro-North passenger train careening off the rails. The geometric precision in the interplay between the compositions and editing would please Eisenstein, and the overall effect of its perfection is so gleeful that I practically barked and clapped at the screen like a hungry seal. I could spend time talking here about how, sure, part of the scene’s impact comes from the ways in which Collet-Serra and muse Liam Neeson cleverly build our overall investment in the fate of that train and the people on it over the course of the film’s tense and taut opening acts, but that shit’s boring, and crashing trains together, sending them end over end with sparks flying into the night—now that’s entertainment. Maybe someone in Hollywood could put Tom and Jaume together for a lunch? Just to see what happens? —Jeff Reichert

Best B: Upgrade
In the recent emergence of Brawl on Cell Block 99 director S. Craig Zahler and the snowballing cult success of Christian Gudegast’s 2018 pinch-me-because-this-is-somehow-good heist flick Den of Thieves, one senses a dawning realization. Perhaps it’s that audiences for what is commonly termed “trash” are by and large more intelligent, observant, and demanding than those who prefer crashingly predictable blockbusters or flaccid, piss-weak “prestige” genre fare like Widows. The latest exhibit to be submitted in evidence is Upgrade, from Australian writer-director Leigh Whannell, co-creator of Saw and the markedly less insidious Insidious franchise. Whannell has jacked up his M.O. (grand larceny of existing ideas palliated by relentless, pleasure-spurring invention; layered thrills boosted by wrenching emotional conflict) and launched it into the agglomerated realm of (im)pure genre, the once fecund territory of the grindhouse B movie. Right from the spoken opening titles—perhaps a nod to Orson Welles, whose films were sometimes B pastiches (Mr Arkadin) or released as real B pictures by studios who wanted them to disappear (Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil)—you sense you’re in for something a little stronger, in every sense, than your usual action-thriller fare. Set in Chicago in what feels uncomfortably like the very near future, it’s an obstreperous and dauntless mash-up of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Hard Target, eXistenZ, Death Wish, The Passion of Joan of Arc, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Knight Rider. Gurgle with satisfaction as Whannell exorcises man’s relatable A.I. paranoia by dispatching his protagonist Shay (Tom Hardy-alike Logan Marshall-Green) on a sanguinary rampage with the help of an internal talking computer called “Stem” implanted in his spine, ostensibly to help relieve the symptoms of his bad-guy induced paraplegia. He’s not a robot—the human brain is making all the decisions—but he occasionally needs Stem to get him out of a spot, by taking over the controls and committing progressively Jacobean acts of atrocity on his behalf, much to Shay’s recoiling, “I’m-so-sorry-about-all-this” chagrin. The rare B that has the courage to try and do something genuine with a piece of indulgent dross, it features a quite ingenious “analogue vs. digital” car chase and the most coherent triple twist ending since Diabolique. It’s funny and brutal and sincere. —Julien Allen

Best Heterosexuality: If Beale Street Could Talk
The heartbreaking tale of Tish and Fonny is one of lovers caught up in the gears of the pitiless American mechanism of racism, their pure, deeply felt romance unable to exist in a drab, resentful, and hostile society that won’t let them be. In adapting James Baldwin’s book, Barry Jenkins wisely doesn’t let their tragedy be the story of them: one is unlikely to leave If Beale Street Could Talk without still being high on the fumes of Tish and Fonny’s erotic bond. The scene depicting the consummation of their love is so sexy I was thunderstruck by the realization of how long it had been since an American film was remotely interested in its actors as sexual beings. Their bodies, their flesh all move to the rhythms of a rainstorm and Miles Davis; he covers her naked body with a sheet in loving care, and she and we look at his beauty with awe (Jenkins’s doesn’t abandon his queer fan base following Moonlight: the first, exquisitely lit shot of Stephan James’s Fonny stripping to his white briefs was the most welcome bit of male objectification in 2018 cinema). The tenderness with which Fonny takes Tish to his bed has an opaque narrative purpose—when he is summarily accused of rape, it is impossible for the audience to believe this lover is capable of sexual violence. But the scene also stands alone, allowing us to luxuriate in the actors’ physicality as much as their emotional travails. —MK

Worst Heterosexuality: Fifty Shades Freed
The biggest letdown of the occasionally clever and knowing Fifty Shades series has been its erotic coyness; its supposedly kinky sex has always come across as haplessly square—like butt plugs straight from the Pottery Barn catalog. While each episode has been at its most engaging when teasing the possibility that Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) might walk away from Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), the genetically perfect, richer-than-God Seattle dweeb with control issues and an indeterminate accent, they’ve been uniformly bad at generating convincing sensual intimacy, putting its mildly charismatic stars through their mechanical paces with goofy Ben Wa balls and spreader bars. In the most off-putting of the final—and worst—installment’s many unappealing set pieces, Anastasia turns the tables on dumdum dom Christian by, wait for it, drizzling Ben and Jerry’s on his chest and abs and licking it off. I prefer to believe the flavor was Chunky Monkey. It’s just one more crazy stop on the way to fetish paradise, culminating in its normiest moves of all: matrimony, parentage, and servile womanhood. At least all this envelope-pushing is finally over; I can no longer take the transgression —MK

Best Neithersexuality: The Wild Boys
Robert Louis Stevenson meets James Bidgood in French experimental filmmaker Bertrand Mandico’s phantasmagoric first feature, which ships a band of nasty, disobedient schoolboys off to a displeasure island as punishment for bad behavior. There, the little savages are exposed to toxic plant life, which literally transforms them into females—a climactic twist that might not come as much of a surprise considering that all of these boys erased are played by adult women. The resulting film is even stranger and more deliriously gratifying than this description could infer, a work of boundless imagination in which not only is gender not fixed, it’s barely a matter of fact. A dense thicket of sounds, superimpositions, and in-camera effects, shifting between black-and-white and color, The Wild Boys is both liberation and horror, anarchic and highly constructed, brave in its focus on the body as both erogenous and alien zone. —MK

Best Monologues: Toni Collette in Hereditary
In Hereditary, Ari Aster not only handed Toni Collette the role of a lifetime but also a rare opportunity to plumb emotional depths that American horror films—and American films in general—seldom make time to examine. As Annie, the film’s spiraling center, Collette delivers not one but two show-stopping monologues, the first a support group confession that quietly unpacks a daughter’s resentment, the second a dinner table castigation that furiously unloads a mother’s grief. The genius of Collette’s delivery lies in her ability to honor the psychological nuances of Aster’s writing, turning the numerous detours of these speeches into natural progressions of a fraught mind at work, as when Annie abruptly interrupts a reluctant case history of her own familial turmoil to insist, “And I just don’t want to put any more stress on my family,” or just barely softens her wailing condemnation of her son, who has yet to apologize for the accidental death of his sister, to add, “And I know you miss her, and I know it was an accident, and I know you’re in pain—and I wish I could take that away for you.” Aster is particularly attuned to the imperfections of everyday speech and the ways in which the brain becomes sidetracked from its initial, primary focus; his screenplay for Hereditary is one of the film’s more under-acclaimed triumphs. But, of course, his monologues wouldn’t rouse much interest without a sagacious interpreter to give them their quivering and explosive life. If Collette risks overplaying at the dinner table it’s only because she has committed to uncovering the ugly truths of the character with all the force she can muster, scaling expressive heights with a fearlessness that few actors exercise, much less possess. —ME

Best Remake: The Overlook Hotel in Ready Player One
The references come so fast and furious amidst the visual overload of Steven Spielberg’s pummeling pomo pop pastiche—which was often unfairly criticized for being too much of the thing it was intending to be waytoomuch of—that it comes as a relief when it finally slows down midway through for an extended set piece. The decision to send its group of goofy Oasis avatars through an impeccable simulacrum of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel is anything but the pandering slam-dunk some detractors might claim, as using The Shining—the ultimate cinematic fetish object, beloved by both art-film aficionados and slaves to geek culture—is an easy target for the ire of cinephiles and fanboys at once. Spielberg doubles down on the risk, transforming the horror classic’s meticulous frames into the backdrop for wholly, brilliantly inapt Resident Evil–style video game mayhem, which speaks eloquently to how Kubrick’s images, once derided for artistic over-reaching, have been co-opted into easily identifiable product. At the same time, there’s a pure pleasure to seeing Spielberg doing Kubrick again, both paying tribute to a friend with whom he had an unexpected artistic symbiosis (A.I. is nearly as good as anything either of them did, after all) and poking fun at his own commercial instincts. —MK

Trailer of the Year: Destiny Pictures Presents…
Heralded by a simple C5/C6 octave chord on a piano, a warm voice intones a sober message: “Seven billion people inhabit this planet. Of those alive today, only a small number will leave a lasting impact.” Ah, ok. It’s an advert for HSBC. Wait, Trump is in this? And Kim Jong-Un? And wait, it’s actually a trailer… for a U.S.-North Korea summit on denuclearization. In all its humdrum professionalism—stock footage of U.S. scientists in laboratories; Korean soldiers on the march; repeated pictures of the two vile men-children waving—it constitutes, by its very existence, one of the most extraordinary four minutes of film of 2018. And a strong contender for the most impressive single thing this ruinously pathetic administration has produced in its three-year term to date. The National Security Agency has claimed “authorship” while the real Destiny Pictures—because it was too much trouble to check—screamed its lack of involvement as if accused of war crimes. But we don’t really know who devised, cut, or narrated this “film for an audience of one.” It’s tempting to play a guessing game: Peter Berg, maybe? Frederick Wiseman, for a laugh? At its climax, the footage is reversed, and we see ICBMs fly back down into their scabbards. If we overlook two things—the terrifyingly direct military threat buried a centimeter beneath the narration’s surface, and its central message that North Korea needs to open up and invite inward investment and influence being the single most unpalatable idea any follower of North Korea’s Juche ideology could contemplate—it still manages something which no serious political operator would even have attempted. It appeals directly to Kim’s imaginary sense of his own greatness. Idiocratic proof—which we never thought would be needed—that on the biggest stage of all, it takes a dangerous moron to know a dangerous moron. —Julien Allen

Most Instructively Named Director: Lukas Dhont (Girl)

Best Drinker: Nicholas Duvauchelle in Let the Sunshine In
Among the many delights of Claire Denis’s tender-erratic romantic gauntlet is Duvauchelle’s self-involved theater actor nonchalantly guzzling beer after beer while half-heartedly romancing Juliette Binoche’s nominally interested artist at a bourgie bar following a performance. There’s no better example of Denis’s casual brilliance at knowing exactly where to place the camera and where to cut between shots than this seemingly tossed-off comic scene: just keep your eye on that beer glass, which is never allowed to stay empty very long. And in a few quick strokes, the desiccated-handsome Duvauchelle again proves he’s one of the most gracefully off-putting heartthrobs in French cinema—any of his characters would sell you down the river for a pint. —MK

Best Effects Makeup: BorderWorst Effects Makeup: On Chesil Beach

The Alfred Molina-in-Love Is Strange Award for Best Understated Acting by a Notorious Ham: Paul Giamatti in Private LifeHere we go, I thought to myself as Paul Giamatti’s Richard strode into a fertility clinic midway through Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life, ready to ream out a male doctor for insulting his niece’s lackluster egg development. The set-up all but promises a red-faced, gasket-blowing tantrum, the sort we’ve watched Giamatti enact in role after role, with little variation over the years, from Sideways to Cinderella Man to The Last Station to Straight Outta Compton. Color me surprised, then, that the scene turns out to be a most welcome change from Giamatti’s standard performative mode. It is a testament to both Jenkins’s astute characterization and Giamatti’s unusual subtlety in this part that Richard’s outburst is a stammering and halting mess, complete with a mortifying final slip-up that finds him knocking over a rack of brochures with his jacket, botching his own dramatic exit. Richard storms into the office envisioning himself a hero, the noble defender of his niece’s follicle count; by the time he is voluntarily cleaning up brochures from the floor, he has shrunk back down to human smallness. A rare moment of release for the character, the scene encapsulates what’s so special about Giamatti’s work throughout the film, in which the actor remains steadfastly committed to evoking the uncomfortable realities of a dolorous everyman at the end of his rope. Most directors have seemed to forget he is capable of such sensitive, lived-in acting; here’s hoping he’ll find more collaborators, like Jenkins, who will encourage him to drop the hysterics in favor of this kind of emotional honesty. —ME

Queerest Follow-up: Harris Dickinson in Postcards from London
After breaking through with his performance in last year’s Beach Rats as a 22-year-old closeted Brooklyn Adonis who puts his chiseled body on display for thirsty older men, Harris Dickinson appeared on these shores again as a recently uncloseted London Adonis who puts his chiseled body on display for thirsty older men. In Steve McLean’s dandy New Queer throwback, Dickinson’s Jim leaves home to strike out on his own and falls in with a group of young male escorts who serve as raconteurs as much as hustlers—they must be aesthetic objects for cultured gents but also able to discuss art history and the finer points of Caravaggio and Titian while lounging postcoitally with their oh-so-literate johns. To hyper stylize things even further, Jim is afflicted with Stendhal Syndrome and passes out when he encounters aesthetic perfection, resulting in much, much swooning. Soon enough the up-and-coming Dickinson will leave behind such foppish fancies for greener, straighter, shittier pastures (he has Maleficent 2 and Kingsman: The Great Game on the docket), so bask in the unfettered queer narcissism while you can. —MK

Most Delightful Company: Juliane Sellam in Maison du Bonheur
When Canadian filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz was invited to stay with a colleague’s mother in Montmartre, little could she have known this middle-aged stranger would have become such an endlessly lovable movie protagonist. With 30 rolls of Kodak 16mm film and a Bolex bought off eBay, Bohdanowicz showed up unsure of what would even be worth shooting at all, and those lack of expectations resulted in a film of such unpretentious beauty that it could encourage new filmmakers to never plan anything again. Bohdanowicz finds many exquisitely melancholic camera subjects (rain puddles, blooming terrace gardens, rows of folded beach umbrellas during a sojourn in Normandy), yet always at the center is the 77-year-old widow herself, an astrologer with a sing-song voice, an infectious toothy grin, and a love for pastry. The pleasures and the comforts of this one woman’s life become the pleasures and comforts of every viewer, a tiny adventure that doesn’t travel very far from this woman’s heart. —MK

Most Mystifying Accomplishment: Destination Wedding
This was the one in which eminently likable actors Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves were intentionally transformed into the most off-putting screen duo this side of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist. Congrats?

Biggest Missed Opportunity: Michelle Pfeiffer’s Comeback
Andrew Dosunmu’s Where Is Kyra?, an unsentimental and formally audacious character portrait of a down-and-out Brooklyn woman, is the most adventurous undertaking of Michelle Pfeiffer’s career. In her first solo vehicle in nearly a decade, Pfeiffer, once referred to as “the best we have” by no less than Martin Scorsese, gives a revelatory, raw-nerved performance that, in typical Pfeiffer fashion, consumes our attention whole with a magnetism marked by decades of hard-fought experience. Working in an atypical dramatic register with a difficult protagonist and an under-known director far outside the mainstream, Pfeiffer takes the type of intrepid creative risk that many of her contemporaries seem largely uninterested in pursuing. Short of her bone-chilling, movie-making walk-on in mother!, this is easily the best work the actress has done this decade, maybe even this century, which only makes it more regrettable that Kyra was largely overlooked during its minuscule theatrical release this past April. Part of the blame, sadly, lies with the famously press-shy Pfeiffer, who has shown up (i.e. obeyed contractual obligations to mega-studios) on red carpets and late-night talk show couches for everything from Murder on the Orient Express to Ant-Man and the Wasp in recent years, but was a no-show at this nickel-budgeted indie’s Sundance and BAMcinemaFest screenings, not to mention the Gotham Awards ceremony where she was a surprise Best Actress nominee. But, with all due apologies to the folks at, uh—checks IMDB—Great Point Media, what might Kyra’s fate have looked like with a reputable distributor that possessed the manpower to support it through word-of-mouth and the funds to get it seen by a larger demographic than an 11-block radius in midtown Manhattan? Then again, I doubt any subset of potential moviegoers heard more about Dosunmu’s drama than “Film Twitter,” a community eager to stan Pfeiffer with “YAS KWEEN” screenshots of her turns in Scarface, Batman Returns, and The Age of Innocence but unable to spare a word or 98 minutes for this singular actress’s adventurous return to leading-ladydom. I won’t deny anyone’s rightful urge to idolize Elvira Hancock, Selina Kyle, or the Countess Ellen Olenska, but how can we possibly expect our greats of a certain age to keep taking risks and courting innovative, noncommercial storytellers if we fail to support their actual efforts at doing exactly that? —ME

Not as Sexy as It Sounds: Jérémie Rénier making out with himself in Double LoverSexier Than It Sounds: Steven Yeun yawning indifferently in BurningAs Sexy as It Sounds: Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams swapping spit in Disobedience

Best Use of Andrew Lloyd Webber: 24 Frames
Exactly no one was surprised that the great Abbas Kiarostami’s final film, a structuralist exercise composed of two dozen long takes of photographs (and one Brueghel painting) coming to life in ways beautiful, frightening, and meditative, would be uniformly gorgeous beginning to end. But who could have predicted that the grace note, sending us off into the night with tears in our eyes, would be put over the top with a saccharine ballad by none other than schmaltz master Andrew Lloyd Webber? His “Love Never Dies”—the major-chord majesty of which echoes Puccini’s “Un bel di vedremo” from Madame Butterfly, used earlier in the film—accompanies a restive image of a computer screen lit up by a slowed-down image from the end of William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, while a woman (the editor?), her back to us, sleeps with her head on the desk in the foreground, trees swaying outside the window. The song was written for Webber’s sequel to Phantom of the Opera (which has never made it to Broadway), but the music soars, and the pure, earnest words gain new meaning from the context. It becomes both a testament to our obsession with cinema, and to the eternal power of this great artist. “Try to deny it/And try to protest/But love won't let you go/Once you've been possessed.” —MK

A towering figure in the world of French documentary cinema, Claire Simon has been working steadily in the cinema since a mid-1970s internship with Algerian filmmaker Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, and has been directing both narrative and nonfiction films—or films that combine elements of both—for over 30 years now. Simon met Lakhdar-Hamina while still a student of Arabic and anthropology, and would in time be drawn into the orbit of the Ateliers Varan, an organization for training documentarians based in Paris but international in scope founded in 1981 with the backing of another anthropologist-cum-filmmaker, Jean Rouch.

If not quite achieving the notoriety of Rouch, Simon has established herself as one of France’s leading practitioners of the documentary form. In the United States she remains something of an unknown quantity, notwithstanding the longtime advocacy of her friend Ross McElwee, but that state of affairs seems slowly to be changing. In 2017 Simon traveled stateside to receive the True Vision award from True/False, the festival in Columbia, Missouri, that specializes in so-called hybrid documentary work. In February, New York’s Metrograph theater will give an American theatrical run to her film Le concours (The Competition, 2016), which records and distills the process of applying and interviewing for one of the coveted 40 annual slots for training at the Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son, familiarly la Fémis, among the most well-regarded film schools in France and indeed the world, and a former employer of Simon’s. Examining the examiners, it’s a cool-eyed interrogation of the cultural gatekeeping process, pinpointing innumerable little slights relating to class and race along the way, and so pulling back the curtain on the process whereby the culture industry perpetuates its own familiar image in a coming generation.

Pedagogical institutions also provide a framework for the two Simon films featured at MoMI’s First Look: 1992’s Récréations, set entirely on a school playground courtyard occupied by approximately kindergarten-age children, and 2018’s Young Solitude (Premières solitudes), featuring a cast of ten eleventh-grade students at the collège and lycée Romain Rolland in Ivry-sur-Seine, a southeastern suburb of Paris. Made nearly a quarter century apart, the films show a great consistency of method—Simon shoots them herself, achieving a remarkable level of unobtrusive intimacy in doing so, while using irruptions of nondiegetic music to banish any illusion of seeing unmediated reality—and interests, using a focus group-like sampling of schoolmates as a social microcosm. Each film belongs wholly to its era—the omnipresence of earbuds, for example, plays a key role in Young Solitude—while at the same time accessing and capturing certain perennial truths about the developmental stages they depict: these are movies that invite shivers of recognition, and which excavate half-buried memories.

The inspiration for Récréations, as with many of Simon’s projects, came from close to home—observing with interest the roughhousing play of the children at her young daughter’s school, Simon asked and received permission to shoot there. The result is a series of vignettes from the schoolyard, very often shot at eye level with the small subjects. Barring the opening image of a young girl awakening in bed, Simon limits herself to recording the playground during the recess period, capturing the drama of improvised storytelling games, shifting allegiances, and miniature uprisings that occur every day on this small patch of concrete. The opening scene, which runs close to a quarter of the film’s overall runtime, establishes issues that will be at play throughout: gendered dynamics; the relationship between self-appointed narrators, who issue commands and author the rules of the game, and the actors, who obey them; and the swiftness with which these arrangements can fall to pieces.

A small boy with a red neckerchief, Thomas, leads a smaller boy into a corner of the courtyard, intent on playing a game of barber, casting himself in the position of pride. Another boy, presumably noting that the metal barrier that’s been designated as a barber shop looks rather more like prison bars, tries to intervene, changing the story to one of jailbreak, but Thomas wrests back control of the story, dominating the interloper, chasing off a group of girls proposing a domestic game of their own and, when the prison narrative becomes irresistible, finally taking control of it himself, even continuing it as a one-man show when his playmates have been led off by other prospects. As the group reconvene, Thomas proposes an organized assault on a child called Alex, but for a moment the little mob drifts out of mic range, and in that moment the pack has redirected its fury towards Thomas, who they take turns methodically kicking at while he perches on a jungle gym structure, letting out almost simian shrieks. “He wanted to put us in prison,” one of the boys explains, “So we attacked him!” Sic semper tyrannis! But there is some consolation in defeat—the weeping Thomas is defended and comforted by his girl classmates, his sniffles dying down as he walks away hand-in-hand with a group of them, the former blowhard now grown sympathetic in his vanquishing.

“Boys are more fragile than girls,” one of the subjects of Young Solitude is heard to say, and watching Récréations one has the sense that girls are at the very least kinder by natural inclination. The movie concludes with another extended scene of group play in which a gang, principally made of girls, are taking turns making a short jump to the ground from the back of a bench. As they do, a curly-haired girl, Nathalie, looks on and sobs for her mother, paralyzed with fright at the prospect of the leap. There is some exasperation and some chiding and even some mockery from her classmates, but finally an expression of support as Nathalie seems to recognize the essentially psychosomatic nature of her fear (“You know I think it’s in my mind…”), and the girls help her to practice the jump in incremental steps, slowly building her confidence, holding her hand along the way, until she’s able to take the final leap of faith that caps off the film.

One gets a feel throughout for the capriciousness of children at this age, the arbitrariness with which little things can suddenly be assigned a life-or-death importance—the hoarding of collected twigs as though they were more precious than gold, for example—and then just as quickly forgotten. Each recess period is a mini-drama in which grandiose schemes are hatched, only to be swept away by the women who we briefly see tidying the courtyard after the children have returned to class. Simon infiltrates these miniature intrigues and follows them in their state of constant flux by letting scenes play through with an eye to real-time duration and a minimum of obtrusive cutting, limiting externally imposed commentary to the skronky saxophone of composer Pierre-Louis Garcia and a lone piece of voiceover, a spoken opening epigraph from Benedict de Spinoza’s The Ethics: “Man’s inability to control and contain his feelings is something I call ‘servitude.’ Indeed, a man subservient to his feelings isn’t dependent on himself but on chance, whose power over him is so great that he is often forced to do the worst even if he sees the best.”

The subjects of Simon’s latest film, Young Solitude, are rather older than the tykes of Récréations, but they face the same struggles to overmaster their rebellious emotions—as, in fact, all of us do. “Fall in love, then we’ll talk about self-control,” offers one girl to a classmate after she’s chided her friends for their foolishness in punching walls in fits of passion. Premières solitudes is in essence a series of dialogues, and at the center of all of them, in one way or another, is love. The teenaged ensemble, seen breaking apart and recombining in roundelay of seemingly casual pairings and other groupings, talk about their own relationships and their aspirations for them. They speak also about their relationships with their parents and their parents’ relationships with one another, and as they do a pattern emerges, for each child seems to come from a single-parent home, or an otherwise dysfunctional or at the very least nontraditional background. Save for the early appearance of a school nurse and brief cameos from a teacher screening a scene from Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) and one girl’s barman father, grown-ups are almost entirely absent from the action, the kids seemingly left to fend for themselves, like the girl we see doing her shopping alone at the Carrefour supermarket.

Young Solitude ends with a group of youths contemplating a nocturnal cityscape and discussing whether or not humankind is all by itself in the universe, and as one might expect given the title of Simon’s film, while watching it one is reminded over and over again of the keening loneliness of the teenage years, that sense of being both teasingly proximate to and impossibly far away from real life. (In this regard, the selection of Ivry-sur-Seine as a setting is perfect—just a short RER train ride from central Paris, it’s agonizingly peripheral.) Aside from commiseration with peers, those ever-present earbuds offer their own trusty companionship, and play a role in an elating early scene, in which one of the girls dances in a stairwell to the Bollywood hit “Gun Gun Guna,” her pink scarf matching the bannister paint in a touch that Jacques Demy might admire.

Just as resonant as the sense of isolation that Simon captures, though, is the feeling of generational solidarity that is desperate in adults but touching and necessary in youth. (There are few statements of unity more moving in cinema than Edwin Phillips’s simple, tossed-off statement to a newly skint Frankie Darro in William Wellman’s 1933 Wild Boys of the Road: “You know I’m always with ya.”) The subjects of Young Solitude come from a wide variety of backgrounds—a Cambodian girl whose parents are hopelessly estranged; the adopted daughter of a large, impoverished family from rural Nigeria; the son of a Portuguese construction worker easily brought to tears by the thought of his estrangement from his aloof father; the daughter of a lawyer whose diminishing fortunes took the family from the beating heart of Marais to the boring ’burbs. Consequently, they are subject to different pressures of varying degrees of severity, but there is little sense of a hierarchy of grievances. After getting misty eyed over her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, a girl listens to her friend rattle through a frightful family history rife with abuse, schizophrenia, and suicide. “My problems are nothing when compared to yours,” she offers. “It’s not a competition,” the friend replies.

If there is a competition here, it is perhaps with the unseen parents’ generation—a desire to do things better, to follow in no footsteps, to not fall prey to irreconcilable differences and estrangement and divorce, to define one’s future in opposition to one’s family history. The idealism that Simon captures, too, brings memories rushing back, as familiar as the loneliness, the camaraderie and, implicitly, the disappointments that await with the adult crash.

The earliest known mention of a camera obscura is from the 5th century B.C. Chinese philosopher Mozi recognized the phenomenon of light passing through a small hole into a darkened space to create an image of what's outside and called it a “locked treasure room.” Centuries later it’s believed that many of the Old Masters—da Vinci, Caravaggio, Vermeer—may have used the camera obscura to achieve realistic perspective in their paintings, an aid in the transmission of reality from one place to another. Riffing off this invention of early cinema, Marine Corps Veteran and film director Miles Lagoze and his editor Eric Schuman construct an unflinching portrait of the ongoing war in Afghanistan with their documentary Combat Obscura.

Four title cards at the beginning of the film, intercut with footage of Marines blowing up the “wrong” building and joking around in a tent, set the officially unofficial tone of what is to come in the following hour:

The views expressed by the individuals filmed in this documentary are solely their own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.

The footage in this film was shot by myself and other Marine Combat Cameramen in Afghanistan from 2011-2012

Our job was to shoot and edit videos for the U.S. Marine Corps.

We filmed what they wanted, but then we kept shooting.

Save these initial guideposts, scenes are presented without commentary or context. The disjointed vignettes stretch time, and give a sense of endless futility to the soldiers’ days. They are shot at, they joke and goof around, and towards the end of the film one of them is killed. While there is no clear narrative arc, there is a slow escalation throughout the film that builds to show quite clearly how the confluence of time, boredom, prejudice, and weaponry create a situation with devastating consequences for all involved.

In an early scene a soldier sits in a field with two local boys; he calls his Afghan translator over the walkie-talkie because he thinks the boy is telling him about a bomb. The translator speaks to the boy and tells the soldier he doesn't have anything to say, he was just asking for a cigarette. The soldier, unsatisfied with the explanation, says under his breath, “little fuckin' liar.” In a subsequent scene soldiers point a gun at a man in a field, forcing him to strip. Later a group of men are held under house arrest for hours because they are suspected Taliban members; it's discovered that they were all innocent. Nearing the end of the film, a group of soldiers torture a chicken. That scene cuts to a group of soldiers as they discover they accidentally shot and killed a shopkeeper. “Oh man, we killed a shopkeeper?” “They want to get rid of the body and hide it... this is no good for people to see.” As they wrap the body in a mat, the camera cuts to a group of soldiers on base watching Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me on a portable DVD player.

We live in a time of image saturation; what atrocity escapes unrecorded? And those that do, when they finally come to light, never seem quite as shocking as they should. No scene in Combat Obscura will surprise the jaded audience we have become (except perhaps an early stereotype-crushing scene of a group of soldiers smoking hash on a rooftop). People against the war will feel vindicated by the scenes of senseless violence, while those supporting it will focus on the scenes of Marines being shot at and killed and it will confirm their worldview accordingly. For those of us who have never been to war, it is easy to try and make it just about one thing. By repurposing the footage initially recorded to serve as promotional material for the Marine Corps, Lagoze subverts any idea of a monolithic truth.

Where Combat Obscura is unerringly effective is in its ability to convey the rhythm of life for soldiers in Afghanistan. Intercut between the dramatic instances of gunfire and violence are mundane moments of boredom, fatigue, and watching movies. The film is an endless dance of drama and futility that feels as though it could have been playing on a continual loop over the past two decades. As the war in Afghanistan stretches into its 18th year, it’s shocking to consider that multiple generations of soldiers have experienced the same sense of banality in the same war. A young soldier shipping off to Afghanistan in 2019 may not have been alive to experience the events that precipitated U.S. presence there, but as the scenes unfold in Combat Obscura it's easy to understand just how similar their experience in Afghanistan would be to those who enlisted just after watching the World Trade Center fall in 2001. Using the footage that he and his fellow combat cameramen shot, Lagoze creates a kind of universal diary that is both highly intimate and non-specifically timeless, providing a window onto a world that few not donning a soldier's uniform can experience.

The final scene is a series of video messages soldiers are sending home for Christmas. The last soldier on camera starts and then says, “You know what? Just, never mind, don’t worry about it” and walks off screen. With that abandonment, the film is over. It's a jarring ending to a film packed with so much intensity and conflicting emotion, leaving the viewer to question what is really so important.

“If I stay working here, don't you think it will be the same ten or twenty years later? Only kids’ faces changing every year, in this big building,” laments the downcast school administrator Kisun (Park Jonghwan). This statement is the melancholic heart of writer and director Kanghyun Lee’s fiction debut Possible Faces, which astutely captures twenty-something malaise. In Kisun's monotonous profession, he is just another inconsequential, cursory figure in the lives of his revolving-door students. He has recently been banished from the home of his ex-girlfriend Hyejin (Kim Saebyeok) after living with her for three years; to distract himself from his heartbreak, he concentrates on helping Jinsoo (Yun Jongseok), a wayward student who plays on the soccer team and delays completing a scholarship application.

Kisun soon finds creative work at a magazine, but he never achieves the personal satisfaction he needs because he is forced to embark on a hopeless quest for one of the executives to read his writing. Eventually, Kisun is assigned to write a story on Hyunsoo (Paik Soojang), a deliveryman with a romantic heart in pursuit of companionship who shares a connection to Hyejin. While Kisun remains stagnant and unfulfilled, Hyejin attempts to propel her life forward by resigning from her corporate office job and pouring her entire life’s savings into meticulously renovating her mother’s cheap eatery into a quaint, boutique restaurant. In the midst of this massive project, she struggles to curb her seclusion and maintain a social relationship with her friend Juyeong.

Possible Faces has a jumbled logic devoid of any concrete temporal sense. Kanghyun meanders in and out of his vignettes with little to no indication of when they take place. Days, weeks, and what seems to be months pass by in the blink of an eye without warning. This disordered structure evokes the slippery perception of time as experienced by his depressed leads. Possible Faces animates a generation’s spiritual void and gnawing search for emotional fulfillment within contemporary urban life. In fragmented short scenes intertwined by the turn of chance, Possible Faces keenly studies aimless characters whose lives pinball between despair and grasping the last vestiges of hope. Kisun and Hyejin’s vacuous interactions with others are last-ditch efforts to curb their post-break up unhappiness through some semblance of human contact. The filmmaker hones in on our youthful sense of disconnection from the world around us, the lasting metaphysical connections we have with one another and what happens when they wither away. The characters’ haunted memories of what they once shared hover over the mundanity of their daily lives within the film’s staid flow.

Kanghyun observes his lonesome, disconsolate figures from an empirical distance as if peering through a snow globe. The foursome are rarely seen in close-up, which occasionally displaces the audience from their internal strife and engenders a lack of empathy, but the cast’s fragile performances exude the unhappiness that anchors their characters as well as their longing for something more. Featuring muted colors, Kanghyun's plain, reserved shots are as tepid and blue as the protagonists’ internal states of being. There is a palpable loneliness and dismay that hovers over the entire film like a thick morning fog. Most of the sequences are of the characters in solitary situations, particularly Hyejin; Kanghyun quietly observes her dallying in her room, listening to her iPod while eating at a restaurant, or wandering the winding, narrow streets of the city like a tourist. The film's visual approach reflects the characters’ unsettled existence in an increasingly hectic world that consistently reminds them of their own detachment.

Kanghyun’s young men and women aimlessly drift through the hushed Seoul cityscape in search of that infinitesimal moment "when the ordinary everyday turns special,” one of the magazine photographers states while trying to craft the perfect image. The lofty shots of their surroundings engulf and transform each of them into just another lonely, insignificant face in the crowd. At one point, Hyejin steps in front of a Google Maps van and has her picture taken. She immediately calls her friend to express her excitement that her face will be frozen in time for all eternity, allowing her to leave her mark on the world and preventing her from being forgotten. But then she realizes that her face in the online photograph will likely be blurred, reflective of her struggle to find an identity and purpose in the wake of her failed relationship.

The only profoundly pleasant moment in the film for any of the characters is when Hyunsoo stumbles upon a mysterious journal during one of his deliveries. He silently reads the sweet tale of a woman, her husband, and friend spending a lovely day at Youngsan Park. The crisp leaves of autumn—with their vibrant reds and deep golden yellows—combined with the score’s soft chimes lends a pleasant tranquility to the mise-en-scène. The sequence moves with a languid contentment as the trio shares a picnic and takes a cat nap beneath the warm, radiating sun and the gentle rustling of wind. Hysunsoo can only imagine having a day like this unknown woman describes.

Carwash centers on the kidnapping of a carwash owner in the rural region of Poitiers, but from the onset you would never know such an occurrence took place at all. There is no tense skirmish, no threat made at gunpoint, simply a genial agreement between the idiosyncratic trio of non-actors followed by director Claude Schmitz. The filmmaker studies the surprisingly amiable bond that develops between the long-haired, craggy-faced Thomas (Thomas Depas) and the mild-mannered Francis (Francis Soetens)—two lumpy figures with constellations of tattoos on their arms—and their “hostage” in the loosest sense, Wilfrid (Wilfrid Ameuille), a quirky, bespectacled hermit with an ever-present twinkle in his eye who loves to wax poetic about his beloved garden and compose poetry. Wilfrid gamely allows them to purloin smatterings of coins from the carwash each day, slowly building their till, on the accord that they keep him company in his sprawling countryside estate. The arrival of Lucie (Lucie Guien) and Hélène (Hélène Bressiant)—the men’s girlfriends—throws a monkey wrench into Wilfrid’s contented arrangement. Serving more as decorative objects than fully fledged characters, the women satiate the men’s ennui or function as bank tellers, keeping track of their stash. They become suspicious of Thomas and Francis’s arrangement with Wilfrid who is, by all accounts, supposed to be their prisoner.

From here, Schmitz whittles a leisurely yarn with only the most threadbare of narrative action. He shot with no formal script or framework in mind, content to merely observe in fixed, distant shots the desultory minutiae of his hapless subjects. Carwash revels in the particularities of fleeting moments such as Thomas boisterously singing along to Jacques Brel, his girlfriend pretending to lose her ring so that he will buy her a new one, or Wilfrid’s joy swimming in the lake for the first time in eight years. The comic lyricism that runs throughout Schmitz’s film is drawn from the atomic eccentricities of his lonely protagonists: Thomas’s idle bickering with a local townsman, Wilfrid’s scrupulous instruction on how to properly hoe to two apathetic teenagers, or the way he behaves like a jilted lover when Lucie and Hélène arrive on the scene. Schmitz's Carwash moves at a gentle pace, basking in the trio’s effortless repartee and their droll, improvised rhapsodizing about love or morality. At times this languidness threatens to tip into the banal, but the screwy conjuncture of a half-hearted abduction and furlough from the modern world keeps the film afloat, especially as beheld by Schmitz’s crisp eye for detail.

Schmitz shoots in a 4:3 Rohmerian style with a 16mm lens that lends a pleasant charm to the hushed, sun-dappled landscapes of Wilfrid’s spacious chateau or the majestic spires of the Poitiers Cathedral the group visits in the quaint, busy town. He often frames these georgic vistas in distant shots where the vast surroundings of looming emerald green trees and pale yellow plains dwarf the small figures of his characters. Carwash breathes with a quiet stillness, particularly in these idyllic moments where the only sound is the twittering birds, the hum of a distant lawnmower, or the low, rumbling wind of an approaching storm. The serenity of these images and scenes languidly flow into one another, evoking the protagonists’ laconic state of being. Schmitz juxtaposes these gentle and bucolic tableaux with the more stimulating sensations of the posse’s visit to town: the thumping house music, loquacious crowds, and sharp sounds of tap dancers’ shoes on cobblestone streets. The exhilarating ebb and flow of society differs from the resting serenity of their arrangement with Wilfrid. Apart from the opening scene, the only instance of musical score is during a scene in which the group stands transfixed before a burning fire. Schmitz arranges swift close-ups of his subjects to the driving sounds of synthesizers swirling like the embers that flicker in the night sky—a quiet, reflective moment that ties together these inert and questioning souls meandering through life. Carwash takes a tense turn when an unforeseen event impels the thieves’ avarice.

At just shy of an hour long, Schmitz’s Carwash does not probe too deeply into the ragtag gang’s inner lives, occasionally losing its emotional thrust, but one becomes lost in its poetics of language, the ease with which the group quibbles or reflects on existential quandaries and the quirks of their personalities. The film flourishes in the subtle humor drawn from the characters’ tête-à-têtes. The easygoing ruggedness of the performances by Depas and Soetens engages, but it is Ameuille’s unreserved eccentricity that carries the film along. Carwash moves with a breezy fluidity as if lolling by Wilfrid’s favored lake.

“It's a freeze-frameStill it's real lifeYou don't want to lookCause you've seen the film and you've read the book.”
—Elvis Costello, “Black and White World”

If, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details, then Chris Kennedy’s 36-minute marvel Watching the Detectives finds in that idea a working metaphor for the modern condition. Comprised entirely of Reddit posts and image-board photos from a group discussion about the Boston Marathon bombing, the film is both a document of its time and a diagnosis of The Way We Live Now. In the days following the April 2013 attack, a group of anonymous armchair sleuths took to Reddit and sister site 4chan to postulate as to the identity of the perpetrators; their posts, excitable bursts of self-assured scrutiny based around lo-res images of the bombing captured by civilians, brought forth a few intriguing theories, as well as a number of absurd, unfounded allegations—none of which stopped major news organizations from reporting these claims as fact.

What Kennedy has done with this material is so simple yet inspired it’s a wonder no one had thought of it earlier: through a briskly unfolding montage of text and image he’s fashioned an investigative documentary in the guise of a political thriller. Allowing the words to speak for themselves, Kennedy forgoes the use of sound, focusing attention on the rhythm of the typed exchanges—which range from humorously flippant to genuinely persuasive—and the details of the associated imagery. Taking it upon themselves to sift through the sea of civilians for clues, discrepancies, and suspicious behavior, the commenters quite literally chart a course through the aftermath of the bombing (via a maze of computer-generated arrows and circles that attempt to match sight lines and connect unrelated individuals). It’s here where biases and prejudice take on an air of self-perpetuating groupthink, with “brown people” as sole persons of interest, certain backpacks designated as more functional terrorist tools than others, and jackets, hats, hoods, and beards as agreed-upon markers of potentially nefarious motives. Needless to say, the Internet didn’t crack the case.

Kennedy, a Toronto-based artist whose film practice has roots in structuralism and observational nonfiction, has for 15 years worked to cinematically refashion notions related to the basic tenets of perspective, depth, and space, often with regards to landscape and arenas of public assembly. (The name of Kennedy’s website, theworldviewed.com, provides as appropriate a description as any for his philosophy.) His 16mm shorts Memo to Pic Desk (2006) and lay claim to an island (2009) utilize a variety of archival materials and texts—letters, memos, civic correspondence—as tools to interrogate images (both still and moving), geographic settings, and sociopolitical contexts, and together offer the clearest precedent for Watching the Detectives, by several measures his most ambitious work in this mode to date. Updating these concerns for the present day, Kennedy highlights the increasingly troubling way we digitally consume and interact with real world events, and how these online platforms have enabled new ways to observe, examine, and, ultimately, profile complete strangers. Compulsively watchable and absorbing, it’s a film that entertains even as it implicates. The real world has rarely looked so strange.

Reverse Shot: I’m curious about the initial conception of Watching the Detectives and your first encounter with the Reddit thread used in the film. Is this something you belatedly discovered and researched, or did you stumble across it at the time of the Boston bombing?

Chris Kennedy: When the Marathon bombing happened, I was obviously interested in the news and was following that pretty closely, reading various news blogs, and one mentioned that a “/findbostonbombers” Reddit thread was happening. I checked it out and I was really fascinated in the moment with how each of those threads would create a narrative, how you could kind of follow one character until all the rumors about them were dispelled—like, “Nope, that’s not the right person.” Each of those threads would create this realm of possibility.

So pretty much as soon as I began investigating the Reddit chain I knew that I wanted to make a film about it, because I am really interested in the idea of how we perceive things and how those things are colored by our preconceptions and biases. I started taking notes immediately and grabbed all the images I could. And I had planned on going back for the text but they actually closed the thread—the original Reddit thread is locked now. It took me a year or two to figure out that the Wayback Machine on the Internet archive actually archived the majority of it. So I was able to fill in the pieces using the Internet archive and find about 80% of the original thread and get to work on it.

RS: After the initial inspiration struck, how did you go about making the various formal decisions that define the film: no voiceover, limiting yourself to only text and image, etc?

CK: I’ve limited myself to text and image before, and I’ve worked on a couple of other projects that were research-based: Memo to Pic Desk which I made with Anna van der Meulen is based on newspaper photos and typed memos, for example. The memos were instructions from the photo editors to photographers, directing the photographers about what to shoot. The memos helped you read the pictures, and think about journalism in general, in a different way.

Since Reddit is pretty much all text and linked images, I thought it was only natural to work in a similar way with this piece. The images, and people’s interventions into the images, were just so visually rich that I thought I could get away with just those two elements and allow the text and images to lead people through it rather than guiding them with extraneous narration, such as a voiceover.

I’m also interested in the way that when we read something there’s already a kind of internal voice that is part of the experience. We kind of carry our own voice into the act of reading and then we hear other people’s voices in the textual inflections as well. There’s a different dynamic between reading a text and hearing someone speak it. When someone speaks it it’s pretty much reduced to that person’s intonation and discussion. It’s been really fascinating reading the film alongside other people in a cinema.

RS: What was the process like editing the various threads and comments into a narrative?

CK: The story itself is a narrative, so the process was basically ordering the discussion lists and going through pages and pages of discussion lists and finding the parts that were the most salient. So it was basically cutting things down. All the text there is original––the only thing I did is condense it if I needed to remove a few things or whatever. I would usually have to reduce a paragraph in a thread to a sentence or two that would get the point across. It’s edited quite like anyone would edit a film. It’s a dialogue with a narrative arc. But then of course there are different threads and I tried to capture the simultaneity of weaving in and out of several threads and coming back to certain things. One of the original ideas was to consider how a narrative works (how we build up suspicion around a person), and the film is made in that way. I wanted to foreground that through the process.

RS: What struck me as I revisited the film is the humor. Was it a conscious decision to keep or include certain funny or humorous comments while maintaining the serious nature of the subject matter?

CK: It’s inherent to the material on two levels: One, that’s what a lot of the Internet is all about: people roasting each other. Online conversation, even when on a serious subject, is usually distanced from the event itself—and distance allows for cynicism and humor to emerge. Secondly, the film relies very much on precise timing, as does comedy, so invariably the humor comes out in that. Obviously some of things people are saying here are funny, while some are quite stupid, but even on the stupid level it can be entertaining. I’ve seen the film in a few different countries now, and American audiences tend to laugh a lot—which is a bit disconcerting. But then I’ve been with audiences who have taken it very seriously. It’s an interesting mix of responses. There must be something there about American culture that I can’t quite put my finger on—a sense of irony or distance or something—or a complete absorption of meme culture. I don’t know.

RS: You mentioned that all the images we see in the film are taken from the various comment threads, but those images originally came from where? Surveillance footage, civilian cameras, newspapers photos?

CK: With the exception of the images of the brothers that the FBI released a few days after the bombing (and which show up about two-thirds of the way into the film), all the images are shot by people on the street. And I think that’s one of the key things about the film: these people are working through a found set of imagery, but that found set doesn’t actually contain what they’re looking for. It is accurate to call the crowd sourced photography surveillance footage in the way that we now surveil each other in our daily lives by taking pictures of each other with our phones, but it’s not surveillance footage in the traditional sense—the security infrastructure that the FBI used to actually find the brothers—it’s not cameras from restaurants or stuff like that. It’s a different type of ubiquitous camera, but it’s not part of the state apparatus—or at least not officially.

RS: And all the eye-line arrows and drawings were made by the commenters?

CK: Yeah, none of that was added by me. The only interventions I did to the images were to maybe clean a few of them up digitally so they had a higher resolution and to frame various parts of the image to guide the viewer through the image. But all the drawings are added by the Internet.

RS: I was curious about your decision to utilize 16mm. Obviously all your other films have been shot on celluloid, but here you’re beginning with digital materials and transferring them to 16mm. Can you talk about the thought process behind that?

CK: There were actually three reasons: a political, a conceptual, and a formal reason. Politically I kind of just wanted to enforce the cinema. By making it on 16mm, I knew that would require a projector, and also require that people gather around to see the film. It would also work against the kind of atomistic behavior of the subjects, most of whom were probably typing from their parents’ basements, collaborating on a collective endeavor, yes, but doing it alone. So I wanted people to collaborate on a collective endeavor in a cinema, with each other, especially because it’s silent and you can hear one another’s reactions, and feel each other’s bodies. And I hope that keeps the viewer accountable to each other in some way and perhaps me accountable to them when there’s a personal appearance.

Formally, I wanted to create movement. When you’re watching a digital slide show, time disappears. It’s flat image after flat image. But adding a bit of grain adds a little bit of movement and propulsion to it. And that propulsion is amplified by the film print zipping through the projector from one reel to the next. You have this event—this screening—that you’re held by for thirty minutes or so––so you’re kind of in a state of anticipation and animation.

And conceptually, it‘s a film about how we surveil each other, so I thought it was important to strip away all the metadata. The 16mm film print is air-gapped. You can’t look at the image and know which camera shot it on what street corner, and under what lighting conditions. And you don’t have information like what program I edited it on, what computer, what make—all that metadata that’s inherent in our digital practices now. By transferring it to film I tore that away. It’s a bit of revolt against all that, a way to say, you know what, all this is so inherent to our lives, how our technology surveils us—why don’t we just strip all that away?

RS: How did you recreate the enlarged Reddit text that we see?

CK: Well, Reddit has its own recognizable format. So there was the font they use, along with the people’s screen names, the up and down arrows, and whether or not a post was liked or not—all that was important, the reference points to what Reddit threads are. But I also wanted to make it more readable than a Reddit page, translating it from a computer screen to a cinema screen. So I chose to recreate the posts as if they were silent film intertitles. That’s kind of what I was thinking as I reframed them. The reference to Reddit is there in all the elements that are important to recreating that, but I thought, well, it’s also a silent film.

RS: Did you find yourself going down a similar kind of rabbit hole as the commenters once you started researching the threads and the various theories?

CK: There were times I became interested in how for a moment you can feel a certain way about a certain possible suspect, because of the way people were framing the situation. But I didn’t really go too far down a rabbit hole, partly because some of the things these people were saying were absurd. For example, there was one thread that I didn’t use where people actually tried to track down where the suspects might have bought their hats, once the FBI released official images of them, so that they could figure out who these people were, based on, like, what Walmart they shopped at. I guess I’m just not that obsessive of a personality. [laughs] That kind of stuff didn’t interest me. I’m pretty content with the picture that came out it: there were two brothers, acting fairly independently to do this thing. The official narrative suits me just fine.

RS: The film certainly reflects a distinctly modern condition, not only in how we interact with real world events but also how the media picked up on these threads and reported innocent people as suspects based on Reddit reports.

CK: Yeah, that’s really how we live our lives now, right? I can read something on Twitter and invariably in the next couple of days I’ll hear CBC, Canada’s international radio broadcast company, run a report on the same subject. This is how we lead our lives. The aspect of the media using Reddit as a source is most explicit in the section about the New York Post. I think that is the kind of the thing the film is pointing to, as it looks at this symptom of our time. I don’t do a broader media critique because I chose to limit myself with what was posted on Reddit, but I think it’s implicit in the film that social media now directs us—we now parse tragedy through this particular mediated form.

RS: You mentioned Memo to Pic desk as an antecedent for what you’re doing in this film. But do you see any other thematic or topical connections uniting your prior body of work with this film, which at a glance resembles a break?

CK: I totally submit that people who’ve seen a few of my prior films, especially the ones that have circulated more, like Brimstone Line or Tamalpais—very formal, grids-in-a-landscape films that riff off structural/materialist ideas—may look at this film and think I really changed gears. I’ve heard that a lot, and I’m like, “not really.” [laughs] I mean, in some ways I can see what they mean, but I’m still against representation. [laughs] I’m still thinking through the structures of the image and how it effects how we look at the world. The world is mediated and I’m fascinated about the way that mediation works and sometimes I go right down to the studs. I’m equally fascinated by historical events and occasionally I have the chance to really focus on these two elements—an event and its mediation—in dialogue. So it’s still a very form-sensitive kind of thing. There are other ways I could have gone about it that would be a complete break from my concerns, but I don’t personally see this film as being all that different than what I normally do.

At the same time, I wasn’t totally sure about it. I was quite shy about the process during the making of it and didn’t show it to anyone until near the end of its making. I was sure as far as I knew this was something I wanted to do and I knew how I wanted to do it, and I was content to pursue it. But I didn’t know what it would do when it lived in the world. And I’ve been very pleased with the reception, which has been much stronger and more positive than I expected. People have been responding to the film on its own particular terms and that has been very rewarding. It’s generated a strong dialogue and a new audience and I appreciate that.

Mexico has an often overlooked, incredibly rich, yet grossly ignored documentary tradition, one that has been long aligned with political struggle and which spearheaded a democratized state of the art. From the Instituto Nacional Indigenista to the Chiapas Media Project/Promedios, there is a blueprint for connecting and training indigenous communities to video technology. Yet despite all this, there has long been a blind spot in contextualizing its revolutionary history within the global film canon.

Luckily, this nonfiction cinematic tradition is alive and well today with Ambulante Más Allá. AMA is a roving documentary festival launched in 2005 that provides the framework for building a inclusive independent filmmaking infrastructure, reclaiming an often maligned community and helping them curate their own identities on and off screen. Through workshops, the festival makes documentaries accessible, training disenfranchised filmmakers from Mexico and Central America and reaching audiences often left out of the conversation. The four documentary shorts showing as part of First Look 2019’s Going Beyond: New Films from Ambulante Más Allá document the contemporary Mexican experience, echoing the defiant nature of its cinematic past.

In Weck: Words Are My Voice, we’re introduced to the title character as he creates a promotional video for a conscious hip hop conference he’s organizing with friends. A tattoo artist who moonlights as a woke rapper, he struggles to fulfill his dreams within the traditional small town he calls home. Despite the obstacles ahead of him, Weck’s determination to establish Rap Awareness sees its way through with a finalized date and venue, marking the first event of its nature in Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca. Offering a dose of hip hop culture in an area that’s hardly known for its urban music, the free conference attracts a handful of fans but also confused elders and giggling teenagers who happen to walk by. Weck’s unwavering passion, come rain or shine, is clear throughout the film’s 24 minute run time. Weck credits his desire for artistic expression with saving him from the streets, and director Aldo Arellanes Antonio paints a portrait of a furiously artistic soul through a new kind of lens.

Vanessa Ishel Castillo Ortega’s The Sound of Waves follows a similarly rebellious youth, but this time our protagonist is a precarious and determined disabled Afro-Mexican 15-year-old, Elida. With surfing, painting, and the violin taking up most of her day, defiance of her mother devours the remaining few hours. Nicknamed “Candy Surfer,” Eilda is in the process of discovering her true passion, and it’s clear that nothing is going to stop her. The teen’s steadfast ambition is fueled by anger about the outdated social views on disability she faces every day—her productivity is constantly questioned because of her missing right arm. As the filmmakers set her on a journey towards self-realization, Eilda is given validation by the camera, as she bathes on the sun-kissed beaches on the Mexican Pacific coast.

Following the short program’s unified observational lens, David Montes Bernal’s Caress (Caricia) opens with the title character explaining a nearly fatal encounter with a former lover, establishing the threat of violence that hangs over her and all trans women. Navigating the streets of the Costa Chica region in Guerrero, one of the poorest areas in the country, Caricia dreams of being a dancer, her ambitions overshadowed by the reality of becoming a hairstylist, re-creating a space that’s often the site of hyper masculinity by opening her own salon for locals and queer friends. Also a symbol of a reimagined male dominated environments, the sixth annual Gay Olympics that’s being hosted in a neighboring town catches Caricia’s eye, but her desire to participate is muted by her business-oriented spirit, and also by the fact that she’s the primary caregiver to her aging mother. Caricia’s occasional voiceovers, narrating threatening encounters with men, offer an unfortunate dose of reality in an otherwise joyful expression of survival and community. The most vivacious of the four short films, Caress is dedicated to folks like Caricia, “fighting for freedom of gender expression.”

Taking a more surrealist approach than the other shorts, Magda or the Fish Folk, follows a 23-year-old midwife trainee who inherits a special gift from her matriarchal bloodline after receiving a message in a dream. With her newfound powers, Magda begins to lead workshops, helping women critically think about the patriarchal rule of their fishing town. This 30-minute film, which simulates a dreamlike state with ingenious editing, also makes for a great companion piece with Caress, due to its deployment of voice-overs as a technique to narrate violent stories without the burden of visual representation. Perhaps it could be translated as a strong indicator of the intra-community-based workshops held by Ambulante Más Allá, where deliberately avoiding moments of perturbation is a commonality, making these films rare in the trauma-porn visual ecosystem.

In her article “Mobilizing Indigenous Video: the Mexican Case,” Dr. Laurel C. Smith remarked, “Indigenous video is characterized by a particular methodology, one that is tempered by the desire to initiate and sustain respectful and reciprocal relationships with the indigenous peoples, places, and practices captured by a video camcorder lens.” The historic use of video as a tool of protest for indigenous voices to contest colonialist geopolitics as well as implement ownership over the gaze is amplified in AMA’s series of shorts. Together, The Sound of Waves, Caress, Weck, and Magda, or the Fish Folk magnify the diversity of identities throughout Mexican culture, perspectives that are often completely underrepresented in the greater national canon, and each exemplifies Ambulante Más Allá’s defiant “for us, by us” ethos.

Zhang Ming’s The Pluto Moment is a delightful, quietly subversive film that, under the veil of a personal story, smuggles in details about China’s current cultural moment. In the film, indie director Wang Zhun (Wang Xuebing) visits his movie-star girlfriend, Gao Li (Miya Muqi), on a set in Shanghai. Film technicians are bustling under stark lights, and Wang is at first banned from coming close. This initial forced distance resonates on multiple levels. We soon learn that Wang would love for Gao to star in his art-house film, but he lacks financial backers and cannot finish the screenplay. The realities of his moviemaking practice are clearly far from industry biz and all its glitz. To emphasize this, Ming cuts from the opening sequence on-set, with its large multicultural crew, to a very different nocturnal setting: Wang, stirring in darkness, sleeping outdoors and cramped inside his sleeping bag. He is beside his assistant director and cameraperson Du Chun (Li Xinran), his producer Ding Hongmin (Liu Dan), and his potential lead actor Bai Jinbo (Yi Daqian). As they rise amidst the foggy forest setting in the mountainous Sichuan province, they are clearly far removed from the busy urban center, their economic realities also starkly opposed to those of the commercial set.

Ming’s filmmaking approach is naturalistic, with unobtrusive long takes and understated acting. While at first glance Ming seems to be mainly interested in human relationships, particularly male-female attraction, on further inspection we discover that his most passionate topic is the grit, the ins-and-outs, of filmmaking. And even though Wang is not Zhang, there are some hints that Zhang uses aspects of his own career to create a portrait of an alienated filmmaker. A so-called Sixth Generation filmmaker, Zhang attained early success with his debut, In Expectation (1996), which won awards at a number of international festivals. But he failed to follow up on his early promise, mostly making films commissioned by the government.

The Pluto Moment’s Wang shares with Zhang the bitter taste of lost glory. We do not know what Wang’s film is about; we can only surmise that it is fiction, set in a rural setting. Wang’s scouting for movie sites revolves around what he can and cannot afford. To this end, his producer Ding is there to negotiate every bit of the way—inviting the local big shot from the province to secure funds for the shoot, haggling over the price set by a driver, keeping their local guide, a local Party member, Luo (Yi Ping), in check. Ming luxuriates in the subtleties of the arrangement: Luo takes Wing at first to watch some performers that, while they do sing, accompanied by flashy outfits, large audiences, and electronic music, hardly possess the authenticity Wang seeks. We can surmise that he wishes to give his film a documentary dimension, an “authentic” feel, in contrast to the productions his girlfriend works on, in the city.

In this sense, Wang betrays an ambition to create a work that, while fictional, captures China’s tumultuous transitional moment. In the brief music performance that so dissatisfies Ding and Wang, we witness a clash between China’s pop contemporary culture, fueled by mass media, and its much older traditions. Such clashes have been previously captured by filmmakers such as Jia Zhangke and Wang Bing, or visual artists likeAi Weiwei. The degree to which the fixer, Luo, takes the pop versions of folk culture for granted, and to which they shock Wang and Ding, reveals the role that Ming believes filmmakers play in resisting the rapid pace of change in Chinese society—a sentiment shared by Jia and Wang.

Ping is brilliant as an obsequious and enterprising, but also possibly scheming, village apparatchik cum fixer. We can never be sure if his role is to help Wang get the material he seeks, or instead to ensure, on the behalf of his political bosses, that no unwanted details are recorded that might show the region in a negative light. At one point, Du is bluntly told to erase the footage she has captured, even though she insists it is merely for the film’s internal documentation. In this sense, we get a quick but very clear glimpse of China’s culture of censorship, as it bears on every minute detail of its social and cultural life. Du protests but her argumentation is really beside the point: if she wants the film to exist at all, she will do as told, and delete her footage.

At another point, after the crew’s money has run out—the local backer falls through and they must now use their own funds to proceed in their search for singers—Luo takes them on an exhausting walk through the woods, all the way promising that transport is bound to show up any moment. Again, there is an inkling that at least some of Luo’s intention is to dither and dally, while appearing to be of great service. Ming doesn’t create a Manichean scenario. There are no dark forces in Wang’s way, just the usual daily meddling and pettiness, but also companionship, humor, good-naturedness. Wang exhibits stoical acceptance of whatever obstacles are put in his path. Nevertheless, as the crew marches on through the woods, soaking their feet in a stream, Bai carrying his producer Ding on his back to get across it, we cannot help but note that this is hardly the filmmaking adventure full of excitement and invention we associate with auteur cinema. This then becomes the core of Ming’s film: a slyly, poignantly unsentimental look at filmmaking, as a daily grind, as unthankful, prosaic, and only occasionally high-spirited toil.

Xuebing’s approach to his role is understated and calm, but there is always a sense of ill-ease and lack of confidence, of brooding restlessness. This is brought out mostly in Wang’s relationship with the more demonstratively demanding Du. Early in the scouting process, Du suddenly takes off at night. Ding, who shares the room with Du in a dingy motel, hypothesizes that this is due to Du’s menstrual cramps, but there is also a hint that Ding suspects the emotional, sexual tension between Du and Wang. Here Ming is in familiar territory, hinting at a possible affair between an older filmmaker and a pretty young woman. But where directors such as Hong Sang-soo make entire narratives out of this material, Ming approaches it with a sideways glance—the tension is there throughout, as Du reappears as suddenly as she vanished, and confesses how much she loved Wang’s early films, with what comes across as a teenage crush. But their relationship is far more nuanced than that, for Du has her own private secrets. As the tensions unravel, we realize just how little Wang, and we, know about her.

In this sense, the entire film is centered on such questions of personal knowledge. The country, unlike the city, has a slower pace, and abides more strictly by social décor and local customs. The relationships are always evolving, opaque, as are the power relations. Ding is not so much a mighty producer as she is an enabler, but she’s also a no-bullshit companion, a friend, and an older woman who watches Wang’s insecurities with a cool eye. Much pleasure is to be found in the way Ming establishes these emotional ties, as he shows Wang caught in the drama around an absent power-star girlfriend, a strong-willed passionate young woman, and a more mature, demanding artistic partner. Where all these women are grounded, Wang stumbles and wavers. Ming further enriches this triangulation by introducing a fourth element: young Bai’s eager need for Wang’s approval, as an older male and a director, and also Bai’s shy, poignant fascination with the slightly older but much more assertive and mysterious Du. It is a lovely setup for subtle flickers of hope, disappointment, and the small pains and betrayals that come from living for days on end at such close quarters.

Ming astutely eschews the kind of explosive drama that might have neatly tied up all the elements and tensions that he so skillfully set in place. The story ends, rather, when Wang and crew finally come across their treasure—a group of local folk funerary singers. Ming rewards the viewer with something quite dreamy and beautiful: a performance in a rustic village, with lyrics that speak, mysteriously, of darkness “as only the beginning.” This quick burst of lyricism, which springs up in a mostly documentary like setting—an observationally shot scene of a local funeral, with a performance and a communal meal—conveys a powerful sense that Wang too is only beginning to find his way.

If you’re new to Reverse Shot in this, our 15th year of existence, and you’ve only just happened upon this annual diary of hate, we want you to know we’re actually full of love. We believe in the power of film to move people’s hearts and minds. Unfortunately it can also move bowels, as we’re usually reminded around this time of year. Groan! Below are eleven movies whose rottenness we could feel deep in our lovely bones. But try not to get dragged down into these murky depths. Immediately after reading this, go right back to our best-of list to rejuvenate thyself.

Vice
Just how awful is Adam McKay’s Vice? It’s not sufficient just to call out Christian Bale’s impression performance as Dick Cheney, which plays as The Dark Knight doing Emperor Palpatine doing Dick Cheney. Nor is the movie’s awfulness encapsulated by its parade of empty, SNL-level parodies (Sam Rockwell’s George W. is dumb! Steve Carell’s Donald Rumsfeld is…a bumbling Michael Scott-as-war-criminal), its glib “I’m telling you what to think” fourth-wall smashing asides that are neither amusing nor edifying, or its bizarre refusal to psychologize its deeply psychologizable central characters. Here is a movie that argues that Cheney is the übervillain of our time, a Machiavellian proponent of executive privilege who orchestrated a covert coup that resulted in the Iraq War, torture, and numerous other crimes against humanity. For McKay, this is the cinematic equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. And yet, what exactly is Vice trying to say? As far as I can tell, after 135 endless minutes of tenuously stitched together fragments of scenes painfully lacking in insight or craft, the answer is—not much more than that Dick Cheney was a power-hungry, single-minded devil-in-a-suit with no ideological commitment beyond a desire to fuck the world. Such a vacuous approach to history is made all the worse by Vice’s stock footage of 9/11 and cutaways to waterboarding, which succeed only in exploiting some of the worst imagery of this young century to make its glib, facile points. The man at its center deserves the scrutiny of a more thoughtful, serious, or, frankly, competent biographer. In every possible sense, this movie fails to live up to its burden to history. Yet that may be the least of its problems. How is it, exactly, that a movie depicting a conspiracy to fool a nation into war manages to be such an insufferable bore? For that and that alone, McKay certainly deserves some kind of award. —CW

Suspiria
“Everybody got choices,” rapped E-40. I couldn’t get that hook out of my head while thinking about Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, a film that, whatever else you want to say about it, features some of the boldest choices imaginable—especially considering how easy it would have been to take the path of least resistance. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery after all—see David Gordon Green’s Halloween (below). Guadagnino is playing a different game, swapping out giant chunks of Dario Argento’s giallo-style plotting, desaturating his predecessor’s blood-red color palette into a hazy shade of winter, and encircling the whole thing in an allegory for German postwar guilt and complicity as thick and impenetrable as the Berlin Wall itself (not to mention the tripling-down on Tilda Swinton’s ostensibly chameleonic mystique—suffice it to say she bats about .300). So: choices, not a one of which works or makes sense on a level other than ambition, a virtue made mendacious by bad execution and worse faith—unless it’s the other way around. It would have probably been less bothersome if Guadagnino had just Xeroxed Suspiria, as we would have been spared ballerinas peeing their leotards in agony and sententious monologues about concentration camps. (Richard Brody’s disgusted commentary on the latter was some of the year’s best film criticism.) Was there ever any chance that a film opening with a title card promising (forewarning?) us of “Six Acts and an Epilogue Set in a Divided Berlin” was ever going to be good? Nope. Is this the sort of movie bad enough to potentially put you off a talented filmmaker for the foreseeable future? Yup. —AN

Green BookGreen Book shows its hand early on. Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) tells Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), the Black pianist who has hired him as a chauffeur for a tour below the Mason-Dixon line, that he got his nickname growing up on the mean streets of the Bronx, a byproduct of his capacity to be a bullshit artist. This could be the thesis of the film, which is constantly bullshitting us—mostly into believing it’s truly interested in race relations. Instead, it’s a textbook White savior film, inching us ever closer to Vallelonga’s racist redemption arc. Don’s primary role is to end up in racist situations that allow Tony to eventually be a little more tolerant of Black people—and maybe White viewers will be by the end of it as well. These would-be teachable moments make it so that Don takes the backseat in his own story. It’s worth asking why Ali is winning Best Supporting Actor awards in a story ostensibly about his character’s experiences. The fascinating aspects of his life, including his queerness, feel as though they were just checked off as a courtesy. A Black Queer filmmaker could’ve done Dr. Shirley justice without needing to tell it through the story of his babysitter/driver. Though Ali carries the film—much as he’s had to unfairly carry the burden of its proven inaccuracies—his approach feels in the vein of Sidney Poitier, who spent much of his early career playing the Dignified Black Man. The DBM tends to exhibit no real traces of anger until a late-film monologue in which he airs his grievances about his position in society, to appeal to White consciousness, only to return to his poised, head-held-high, non-threatening ways. The idea that “dignity always prevails,” a line in the film, reinforces the notion of Black exceptionalism. There’s nothing radical about Green Book, but there’s also nothing smart or entertaining about it either. —TM

Halloween
The justification for Halloween’s placement on this year’s Offenses list should be simple enough: for a horror film, the horrors are in scant supply. But it goes beyond that. What’s even more offensive about David Gordon Green’s 2018 entry into the franchise are its vacuous attempts at fan service, its forced self-referential dialogue and clunky attempts at tongue-in-cheek humor, and its overall glossy, deflated, and superficial aping of John Carpenter’s scrappy and potent classic. In the original, Carpenter didn’t have to rely on gore—he knew how to burrow under our skin, invoking dread and terror with ambience and spatiality. No longer an inscrutable, infallible boogeyman, Michael Myers is reduced to a generic, somnambulating slasher. Throughout, it’s hard to understand what exactly Green and co-screenwriters Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride were going for: a work of Scream-like self-aware irony (the script’s desultory topical references, such as the British true-crime podcasters, come across more like Dad-jokes straining for pop-culture relevance); a terrifying action rollercoaster; or a nightmarish drama about the legacy of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and how familial trauma can be passed down through the generations. It’s on the latter point that Green, Fradley, and McBride really drop the ball. The three heroines have no depth, shuffling along the rote narrative contours of family conflict until at last they band together to fight the bad guy, so that Laurie’s paranoia is vindicated in the eyes of her estranged daughter. Even the film’s final, admittedly strongest, set piece reeked of pandering: a transparent bid at fist-pumping, feminist revenge fantasy. —DK

Ocean’s 8
The Ocean’s franchise exists because the films can be counted on for a good time; roguish lads just this side of the charming/smug divide, out on the town, doing what they do best and doing it with gusto. The big reveal may not always make sense, but the crooks—and the actors who portray them—are obviously having a ball, and that is infectious. So why, in the criminally boring “gender-flipped” (just consider the stale taste of that commonly used descriptor) latest in the series, aren’t the female characters allowed to take pleasure in their pursuits of happiness? Would seeing them visibly enjoying themselves undermine our ability to believe in their professional competence? Director Gary Ross and the makers of Ocean’s 8 don’t seem to trust that audiences will believe a complex heist could be pulled off by a bunch of broads. The film may not be plagued by representational invisibility, but its presumption that a non-male cast must spend most of the narrative proving themselves is equally problematic, not to mention disturbingly familiar to working women. The film seems so desperate to convince us that women are capable of the same capers as their male counterparts that Ocean’s 8 feels more like reading a manual on the management of a heist than being part of one, wasting precious zinger minutes on tedious explanations of every mouse trap. And to those tempted to protest the film’s inclusion on the RS naughty list on the grounds of its luminous performers, I say: that is exactly the point. These women deserve better. Mindy Kaling, Awkwafina, Helena Bonham Carter deserve better. Rihannadeserves better. The cast—forming the kind of viscerally satisfying, precisely calibrated collect-’em-all archetypes typically reserved for manufacturing K-Pop bands—is undeniably fabulous, casually diverse, and well suited to their roles; watching them shift the woman's typical place in heist movies away from moll or sidekick, and subvert of the very essence of word “cocky” while doing it, should have elevated the series. Instead, in this queasy tribute to the fight-like-a-man dark side of second-wave feminism, some of our brightest stars are dimmed by the lame patriarchal Hollywood machine that still fundamentally lacks faith in lady rascals or the audiences that come to see them shine. —FZ

Bohemian Rhapsody
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Bryan Singer or Dexter Fletcher or whoever “directed” Bohemian Rhapsody shows neither the craft nor the will to hit either of those targets. Instead, this movie achieves the impossible in exactly one way: proving you can travesty the already-moribund format of the jukebox musical. The script stinks of fishy contrivance, packing a romantic reunion, a family rapprochement, and a triumphant Live Aid performance into one big day. Even after his HIV diagnosis (delivered two years early, for plot convenience), Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury looks as startlingly hale below the neck as he looks prosthetically absurd above it. The production plays imitation games with Freddie’s sexuality, catering less to a censorious audience than a blandly tolerant one that acknowledges queerness but prefers not to delve. By paying such anodyne, awkward lip service to Freddie’s desires, the film not only risks erotic perjury but undercuts its putative portrait of a protean figure, as lusty and unruly in life as on record. But if Bohemian Rhapsody is bad at being a queer movie, it’s even worse at being—well, a movie. The other band members age at remarkably different rates, say nothing of interest, and spend a decade searching for a single decent wig. The production values rival those of Toonces the Driving Cat; even routine dialogue scenes are blatantly green-screened. “But the music!” its fans insist. Hot tip: for an identical price, you could buy Queen’s Greatest Hits on iTunes and crank that shit up or you could hear those same 58 minutes of your favorite songs log-jammed amongst an hour’s worth of dramatic [sic] reenactments with all the verve and texture of forced ads on YouTube. —ND

Peter Rabbit
According to the British Board of Film Classification, the U.K.’s most complained-about film of 2018 was Will Gluck’s Peter Rabbit. Not for the film’s mild homophobia (an unfunny joke is built around a carrot, shoved unceremoniously into Old Mr. McGregor's bottom). Not for its confused soundtrack choices (as many as five different Vampire Weekend songs feature). Not for its geographical inaccuracies (exiting the underground at Piccadilly Circus for Buckingham Palace? I can think of four tube stations closer). Not for the cursed image of Peter twerking (Paddington Bear would never), his face CGI-ed to resemble, with sinister likeness, James Corden’s smug, smirking own. No, incensed viewers berated this crass adaptation of Beatrix Potter’s gentle turn-of-the-century children's books for its needlessly nasty depiction of an allergic reaction to blackberries, maliciously induced. Domhnall Gleeson’s bramble-weary Young Mr. McGregor is pelted with the offending fruit and sent into anaphylactic shock while Peter and his fellow rabbits chortle from the sidelines. A handy EpiPen (!) means that McGregor springs back to life, but in that moment, a part of me withered and died. “I'm whimsical and hilarious!" insists McGregor; the film does the same, a prelapsarian vision of pre-Brexit Britain as vainly imagined by a team of studio execs. —SH

Tyrel
Cultural memory continued to shrink in 2018, which is perhaps why this trifling comedy of discomfort, which plays like an extended episode of The Real World, was frequently touted as “the next Get Out” at Sundance. Though the film is intended to be a cringe-inducing document of a weekend of racial microaggressions, the majority of the action seems to be more a series of strung-together acting exercises than shit guys do when they’re just bein’ dudes. The “games” the group of white friends enjoy playing alienate Tyler, the lone black guy, played by Jason Mitchell, who presumably has not taken an improv 101 course and cannot successfully “yes and…” his way into their circle, so he does what anyone stuck in this lousy, isolating situation could do: sits in furious silence while everyone else laughs, pretends to fall asleep early, and gets blackout drunk. Because director Sebastian Silva doesn’t have anything of substance to say about race and is not invested in Tyler’s perspective in any meaningful way, he’s content to project profundity onto the proceedings with ham-handed symbols like a large, inflatable snowman lawn decoration (you can almost feel the director’s arm on your shoulder, shaking you and shrieking, “Get it? It’s a BIG, WHITE MAN!”), rooms decorated in all white, and an impromptu dance party to R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Arriving a day late and a dollar short to the discourse about race in the United States, Tyrel doesn’t show what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real, but rather what happens when the people who should shut up and listen continue to talk. —VL

Chappaquiddick
It would take a journalist with more time and a higher word count to follow the money and ascertain why this movie was made, and why now, but the surfacing of this Kennedy-smearing exhumation at such a politically fraught time smacks as fishier than the depths of Poucha Pond. That's where, on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts in 1969, Ted Kennedy drove his Oldsmobile into the drink, resulting in the drowning death of passenger and RFK campaign holdover “boiler room girl” Mary Jo Kopechne, which took the senator ten hours to report. The two screenwriters have light writing resumes (one’s a Simpsons animator) and the nominal producer/distributor credits raise no red flags, so it’s best not to speculate about the same conspiratorial tangles in which the film trades—here, deep-state fixers say things like “He’ll know people in government who are sympathetic to the cause” and “We’ll tell the truth, or our version of it,” and a wheezing, stroke-ridden, Vader-like Joe Sr. gasps “alibi!” on the phone. When head cover-upper Robert McNamara (Clancy Brown) jokily suggests that the Apollo moon landing that happened two days after the incident is a false flag distraction, the stretch is a ploy to normalize the conspiracy-minded reachings elsewhere. Later, there’s a montage of various characters watching the moon landing (a trope in dire need of retirement), during which one of Ted’s mop-topped tots actually says to him, “Uncle Jack could do anything, huh, Dad?”, which ties into the film’s lazy gambit of identifying the senator’s hamartia as a family-bred inferiority complex. When Ted (a bulkily bland Jason Clarke, also in 2018’s primary Apollo film, First Man) is flying a Rosebud-substitute kite on the beach, honorary Kennedy cousin (and the story’s dubious locus of conscience) “Old Joey” Gargan (Ed Helms) sighs, “You’ve been like this since Bobby died.” Employing the now-default aesthetics for this kind of material (secondhand muted Zodiac hues and minor key piano tinkling), director John Curran has the gumption to conclude Chappaquiddick with a close-up of Clarke’s eyes in old-face, seemingly reflecting on the tragedy of it all, like it’s The Godfather Part II. —JS

Solo: A Star Wars Story
A Star Wars movie came out in 2018. I watched it. Or I’m pretty sure I did. I mean, I definitely did. But if I’m going to be completely honest with you, I have nearly no recollection of what happened in the movie called Solo: A Star Wars Story. I just read the plot description online and, sure, if you say so. I remember liking the meet-cute between Han Solo and Chewbacca the Wookiee, and Woody Harrelson was in it, and Donald Glover was definitely in it too. But it’s never a good sign when I remember more about the stories behind the making of the film than I do about the film itself, when I form more solid opinions about the embattled production (calling in Ed TV's Ron Howard to save your space lark isn't exactly a come-on) than I do about whatever battles I supposedly witnessed in the movie. It’s over a year after the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and dudes are still fighting about what transpired, still gnashing teeth over how their beloved Luke Skywalker was characterized. Meanwhile six months after the release of Solo and… The kid from Rules Don’t Apply played Harrison Ford and he seemed fine, I guess, nbd. Didn’t they gamble over the Millennium Falcon? Cool. The palette was really dark, but the promotional posters were bright and cheery. There was some comedy, some action, some love interest, some toys—the four quadrants were dutifully honored. But what else? A Star Wars movie came out, sucking all the air out of the room as it will, and half a year later it’s like it never happened. So while the movie wasn’t memorable or frankly interesting enough to be actually offensive, making a $300 million dollar production featuring some of the most beloved characters of the last half-century that’s this blandly inconsequential felt worse. —EH

A Quiet Place
This postapocalyptic horror blockbuster from the director of The Hollars has been lauded for the skilled execution of its tight premise: the monsters kill based on sound, necessitating largely dialogue-free action and the kind of visual storytelling that even dummies can notice as “visual storytelling.” And its big box-office allowed Hollywood to enshrine John Krasinski with the requisite hometown-boy-makes-good laurels usually reserved for true film artists like Ben Affleck. Because it’s so very stupid, it’s tempting not to take A Quiet Place seriously at all. (Gotta love that basement whiteboard laying out the details for all of us unable to follow basic exposition: CREATURE... BLIND... ATTACK SOUND... SURVIVE... WHAT IS THE WEAKNESS?) Yet more disturbing than its silly spiders and predictable suspense set pieces was its sly survivalist conservatism. The film’s beautiful, athletic, white clan’s tenacity celebrates a very particular kind of American family values, and this is reflected in the centerpiece dilemma: Emily Blunt’s Evelyn Abbott is pregnant, and thus will have to give birth without making a peep. Aside from the fact that the eventual sequence itself—of Evelyn delivering the baby while agonizing alone in a bathtub, as the monsters stalk outside the door—is a cheap cop-out (the film just cuts away and the miraculously silent delivery has been accomplished), it’s telling that the film never once questions, wrestles with, or acknowledges Evelyn’s choice to have this baby. Forget that the squealing infant would be a clear and instant threat to the lives of each of the family members . . . what sort of world are they bringing this life into? We’re trained to think that only films that flaunt their politics (like the ineffective cartoon Vice) are “political,” but the cagey A Quiet Place is the most insidious kind of political Hollywood movie. In a Hollywood Reporter interview, Krasinski—whose recent filmography, I came to learn, includes the Michael Bay Benghazi actioner 13 Hours and the series Jack Ryan, based on the character created by neocon Tom Clancy—said, “This is a movie about family. It’s a metaphor about what family is and the extremes you go to as a parent to protect your kids.” Aside from the questionable use of “metaphor,” he here indicates that the ideologically dodgy A Quiet Place functions better as an implicit pro-life drama than a genuine thriller. —MK

Rok Biček’s years-spanning document of the Rajik family is like a postmodern variation on a Thomas Hardy novel. In the past, it would have been fairly easy to look at young Matej Rejik’s circumstances and identify him as someone who’d been benighted by cruel fate. His situation is unenviable, and as The Family (Družina) makes evident, he does the best with the hand he’s been dealt. However, after decades of relativism in the social sciences, anti-interventionist documentary, and well-meaning academic liberalism, we come to The Family with a different, somewhat more complicated lens. That’s to say, we come to nonfiction films with certain assumptions about the people in them (no one is without bias), while simultaneously recognizing those assumptions as biased, and possibly unfounded. We no longer know the proper way to look at a situation like Matej’s, and so Biček’s film cows us into stony silence.

The Rajiks appear to be a relatively poor family scratching out a living in post-Communist Slovenia. We never get any concrete information about their economic status—The Family is short on facts—but their home is old and dirty, they do not seem to eat particularly well, and when particular items are seen that indicate expenditure, they are bottom-of-the-line. Matej, who is studying to be a computer programmer, has cobbled together a PC out of low-grade junk, with a hard modem line strung around his room and out the window. More damningly, when father Boris dies, we see brother Mitja visiting his grave, which is marked by a plywood headstone with press-on letters.

On the other hand, Matej does have a fairly decent car, and is able to provide his baby daughter Nia with a nice brand-name stroller. Later in the film, Matej and his girlfriend Eli quite unexpectedly take a trip to Paris. So one begins to wonder: is Biček is contributing to Matej’s welfare? Does Slovenian life simply look “poor” to the uninformed Westerner? Is the family choosing to spend its money on some things and not others? Whatever the case, The Family continually challenges our immediate narrative of impoverishment, without ever actually dispelling it.

We are also told, from the press notes, that Matej is the only member of his family without special needs. As Biček puts it, Matej “is completely different—both from the different and from the normal.” The degree to which this is the case, however, is not entirely clear. We can see that Matej’s mother Alenka walks with two crutches, and his older brother Mitja exhibits the physical and behavioral markers of Down syndrome. But in his review for Variety, Jay Weissberg claims that all three members of Matej’s family experience mental disabilities. How can we be sure of this?

If Weissberg is correct, then this in itself poses certain problems for the liberal viewer, since on the one hand we can understand that this would be a very difficult, arguably limiting environment for someone of standard cognitive abilities to grow up in. At the same time, we do not want to simply assume that such a family situation would be untenable. This would be inexcusably ableist, since people with all manner of intellectual capacities can be and are fully integrated into mainstream life. We want to sympathize with Matej when, for example, hs fatherBoris tells a school counselor that there is no way Matej could ever go to college, and she has to patiently explain to him that, aside from some possible learning difficulties, Matej is perfectly capable of pursuing higher education.

But we don’t really know for certain whether Boris’s objection stems from misjudging Matej’s intellect or from a class-based presumption of his son’s horizons. And although Boris is grumpy and short-tempered, and Matej’s mother Alenka seems a bit scattered, we would have no idea simply from what Biček shows us that either of them have any mental disabilities. They seem like older parents who are simply distracted and not fully comprehending the ins and outs of Matej’s life. But if we are told that they have disabilities, then of course we begin questioning certain aspects of their responses and lifestyle. The Family confronts us with situations that are perfectly ordinary, without directing our interpretation. It’s only outside knowledge that complicates matters.

Matej’s older brother, Mitja, is another matter. But as we see, particularly in Biček’s early, 2007 short version of The Family, also showing in First Look, Mitja is happy, aware, and engaged, somewhat at a distance from Matej and his friends but still fully capable of social interaction. If anything, he tends to lean into his role as the clown of the group, playing up his disability for self-mocking humor. We don’t see a great deal of intimate interaction between Matej and Mitja, but we do see standard brotherly behavior—affection laced with exasperation.

Biček’s steely, nonjudgmental gaze, combined with his occasional breakthrough into the action—almost all the family members address him at some point, treating his presence as an unobtrusive fact—throws the viewer into a position of crisis. We don’t know if we should feel pity for Matej, or respect, or conclude that “everyone has a family” and his is no different in its foibles than any other. The Family (note the generic, almost Wisemanian title) doesn’t tell you how to feel, and so it can become a mirror for our most deeply rooted prejudices. Matej is neither a victim nor a hero, and whether we recoil at his situation, or defensively validate its normalcy, we are playing into Biček’s hands. Paternalistic liberalism sees the Rajiks, and Matej in particular, as examples of social collapse, or bad luck, or the underdevelopment of Slovenia. There is inadequate evidence to support any of these presumptions, and ample evidence to complicate them.

Probably nothing indicates this quite as dramatically as Matej’s decision, near the conclusion of the film, to relinquish his paternity rights to his daughter Nia. He and his daughter’s mother Barbara are shown to be in a custody battle that grows increasingly hostile as the documentary continues, to the point that Barbara stops allowing Matej to see Nia at all. When he finally uses a family services lawyer to enforce a parental visit, Nia is confused and traumatized, and although it is clear that Matej dearly loves his daughter, he can also see that the rancor between him and Barbara is negatively affecting her.

So he does the unthinkable. He walks away. Even though Matej clearly became a father far earlier than he intended to—and wants to get a vasectomy so as to not repeat his prior mistakes—his relationship with Nia marks the start of a new family, one over which he has a modicum of control. Regardless of how we evaluate, or refrain from evaluating, the conditions of Matej’s youth, we can concede that his own family life, like that of anyone, is a condition of chance, of “thrownness,” in Heidegger’s terminology. When it becomes clear that his conflict with Barbara is insoluble, he makes the one decision for Nia that he can make unilaterally. He lets her go.

Will this be the right decision? Will it create heartache for Nia later in life? There is no way of knowing. But what Biček shows us very clearly is that it is a logical decision, made by a young man situated within a particular set of circumstances. His decision is neither selfless nor expedient. And it is his, not ours.